I pulled the cord tight and retied the knot, but it didn’t help much.
My old Speedo Enduros were on their last legs: saggy, baggy and tissue-thin daggy.
I hoped our budget would stretch to a new pair before the school swimming carnival. The last thing I needed when I was up on the dive blocks was for the twins to fall out of their cradle in front of one hundred and twenty-six Perpetual Suckers.
Last year’s goggles were almost as sad. Eye-poppingly tight, with brittle rubber straps threatening to snap at any moment. I decided against trying to coax an extra centimetre or two out of the strap. I didn’t want to tempt fate, not with new Speedos a priority. I could swim without goggles if I had to, but without Speedos? Uh-uh. Not in this life.
I’d grabbed my swim gear straight after school and walked round to the pool in less than ten minutes. I’d found it easily, thanks to Mr Paulson’s excellent directions. I had the pool change room to myself, and found the bare concrete floor and whitewashed brick walls oddly comforting after the shambles of my day.
I had to admit I would never have survived it without Mr Paulson.
He’d taken up most of morning break ‘touching base’ on things I needed to know. Like where the nearest pool was, when to catch whooping cough so that I could avoid the blokes-bonding weekend on Stradbroke Island, and how to fill in the lunch break that loomed like a black hole, sucking all of the pleasure out of my day.
He didn’t realise it, but assigning me to be lunchtime library monitor had saved me the humiliation of any more friendless lunch breaks.
I’d gone straight to the library as soon as the bell rang, only to be bowled over by a stampede of enthusiastic preppies. Sebastian was in the thick of it, enjoying his reputation for fearlessness in the face of the school vampire.
It had ended up being kind of fun. I read them this picture book about a kid called Nicolas Ickle who was a right little cranky-pants about everyone trying to muscle in on his story: ‘Go away,’ he kept yelling at them. ‘You’re in the wrong book!’
The preppies had loved it, but I’d felt like the poor old confused elephant: stuck in the wrong book, not sure how to deal with everyone wanting to get him out of the picture.
The breeze swung round and the pungent smell of chlorine billowed into the change room. I filled my lungs and followed it out into the harsh sunlight.
I loved the smell of chlorine in the afternoons; loved the way it sliced through the fog of a bad day, freshening and reviving me like that eucalyptus stuff Mum made me inhale over a basin every time I caught a cold.
I sucked it up, happy to be somewhere I belonged for a change.
‘You right, mate?’
The woman behind the counter had a flattened brown face, round and wrinkled like a raisin. She could have been aged anywhere from a sunscorched forty to a pretty sprightly eighty years old. I wasn’t much of a judge of age, but her name badge read ‘Ma Mallory’ so I guessed she wouldn’t be offended by the estimate.
‘I just need a time sheet, please, so I can clock my times for the school swimming carnival and Districts.’
‘Yeah? Well I guess that makes you Henry. Mr Paulson said to keep an eye out for you.’ She whipped a jaundiced eye round the pool. ‘Where’s your mum? She has to fill it in. If you qualify for Districts, they want to know the times are genuine. There’s no bodgying up times at my pool.’
I thought fast. ‘She just had to drop something off. She won’t be long. How about I put the form with my stuff while I warm up? Then she can clock my times when she gets back.’
‘How about you don’t.’ Her lips formed a wrinkled little cat’s bum. ‘How about I keep it right here.’
‘But–’
‘But nothing. It’s my last one. I don’t want it getting wet or blowing away while you’re in the pool. Tell your mum to come see me when she gets here.’ She turned away to serve a harassed mother with a screaming toddler on her hip.
I hung around for a bit, but Ma just ignored me. Clearly our conversation was over. I mooched over to the pool, the air seeping out of my day, and slumped onto the nearest dive block, wondering what to do next.
Ma Mallory sounded like a bit of a stickler for the rules, so if I didn’t get Mum down here, I was sunk.
An old lady cruised towards me like a crocodile. Lane One was strictly for non-swimmers. For people who didn’t know enough to keep left when doing laps. People who zigzagged when they swam. People who didn’t wear goggles or caps, shut their eyes when they swam and then punched you in your goggles as they thrashed past.
The old lady’s flowered bathing cap was pulled tight above eyebrows that had been drawn on in thick red-brown pencil. Her lipsticked smile was a shade brighter, and a good size bigger than her mouth. She had drawn outside the lines, like a kindy kid not used to working with crayons. Her stately breaststroke barely rippled the surface and I couldn’t help but admire her ability to sail through the skin of the water without splashing a drop on her face.
She froggy-kicked towards me and touched the wall. ‘You look like your dog just died.’ Then she turned and kicked off without waiting for a reply.
I stared after her. She might be a crazy pool lady, but at least she was doing something, which was more than I could say for myself. Mum always said that if you ever have a choice between doing something and doing nothing, always take the ‘do something’ option; you never know where it might lead you.
So I put on my goggles, found an empty lane and dived in.
The water swallowed me in a crystal-cool gulp, then spat me back up to the surface. I rolled onto my back, letting the tension ripple off me.
Mum says that I’ve always been able to feel the water ... Before I had hair, before I had teeth, before I could walk, I could swim.
She says the first time she let go of me in a pool, I sank straight to the bottom. She thought I was going to drown, staring up at her from a metre below the surface, eyes round, arms raised, mouth trailing bubbles. But when she reached for me, I pushed away from her and kicked my chubby little legs back up to the surface.
‘You felt the water, Triple-H. You reached out with your little fat hands and pulled yourself back up without me. And when you hit the surface, you laughed. You rolled onto your back and you giggled. All the other mothers wanted to know how I did it. How I taught you to float. But I didn’t do anything. You taught yourself. You could feel the water, even back then, and you trusted it to hold you up.’
Someone was thrashing like an egg beater in the lane next to me. I had opted for one of the middle lanes so I wouldn’t splash the crazy pool lady’s eyebrows. But this kid, he was going to drench her from four lanes away.
He was flailing at the water, determined to beat it into submission. Meeting it chest-on, skinny arms slapping at the surface, legs dragging like an anchor behind him.
It hurt to watch him. Throwing himself against it like it was a barrier he had to smash. An enemy he had to vanquish. After a couple of laps, he pulled up, exhausted. He hung over the lane rope, his back to me, blowing hard, shoulders heaving, water running in rivulets from close-cropped dark hair.
A junior learn-to-swim class had started in the little undercover pool off to the other side. I figured I had about fifteen minutes before the afternoon squads hit the place. Before things hotted up. I planned to do my usual trick and shadow their drills while trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible. Till then, I was happy to chill.
A huge body flung itself into the lane on the other side of me, hitting the water hard, with a painful, wet slap.
The kid behind me muttered, ‘That’s gotta hurt.’
I nodded, my eyes on the belly-flopper, a big bull of a guy who had landed like a slab of meat hitting a chopping board. He reared up out of the water and shook himself off, then put a brave face on it and started ploughing his way to the other end.
‘He should’ve made himself a smaller target,’ I said. ‘Water doesn’t hurt if you thread your way through it.’
‘You reckon?’ The voice behind me squeaked with interest. ‘It fights me every step of the way. I’d rather run five kilometres than swim one lousy lap.’
‘You need to stop fighting the water,’ I said without thinking. ‘Try going at it at an angle, keeping your elbows high–’ I turned to give him a quick demo and stopped dead, one elbow frozen in the air.
The kid next to me with the terrible swimming action was a Perpetual Sucker. The little Spanish kid, Jironomo, the one they called Hero. And you would have thought from the look on his face that he’d just found himself swimming in the same lane as a turd.