SHOWER POWER

The Powers and Halls don’t speak to each other, from ill feeling dating back to their kids’ competition days. But this is only according to Bobo, who prides himself as a gossip magnet.

Yet my new hosts are proving every bit as likeable as their allegedly estranged neighbours, and similarly at ease with life’s intimate, messy intrusions. Mrs Powers teasingly calls her husband ‘my old, grey monster’, and both lay about in bed Sunday mornings in a ramshackle breakfast-and-papers ritual. Their satisfied, complacent existence leaves me wondering why people like me train all hours to feel special. Mrs Powers shows only passing interest in my swimming, and then only to tease about a girl whose parents gave me a lift to my last carnival, or the one she calls my ‘squeeze’, Esther, who occasionally phones.

Returning from school today, I’m pondering the Powers’ impressive insouciance when, on impulse, I take the afternoon off training in homage. But soon I’m nervously checking my watch and at 3.35 wonder if it’s too late to change my mind; I could still run down to the pool, towel on shoulder, to pant convincingly that the bus was late. By 3.45 I know there’s no turning back. Anyway, at least once a week I struggle to drag myself to the pool, and this is the first time I’ve acted on it in months. In fact, I sometimes wish I’d taken up wrestling instead of swimming; it’d be a handy lifelong skill if I found myself in a tight situation — once a swimming career’s over, it’s useless to you. I’m sure I’d have been as good a wrestler as swimmer: in all my play-wrestling bouts, not once has anyone, even Bobo, been able to get me off my feet. And another thing: I loathe getting wet. I never had this problem before training with Talbot, so maybe I’m stuck in some weird Pavlovian aversion to those freezing September outdoor starts, turning any sudden immersion into a shudder of misery until I shake it off in the warm-up, when I’m fine with water again. In fact, after ten minutes it’s not even wet anymore; whatever we’re grappling through could just as easily be confetti or cotton balls. It’s only that moment jumping in. And then there’s swimming after dark, which makes me feel like I’ve fallen off a wharf at midnight, regardless of how many floodlights are glaring over us.

I know I’m stretching things with Talbot by taking the afternoon off. I did exactly the same six months back and had to go riffling through the Yellow Pages for the name of a cemetery where I might have attended a distant cousin’s funeral in case Talbot doubted me, though this seemed unlikely with such a morbid alibi. When he asked for that cemetery’s name the next morning in a token interrogation, I answered with authentic hesitation: ‘It was some really weird name, like … Field of something. Is it Field of Mars?’

‘Yeah, that’s it,’ he snapped, saying to jump in with the others.

I must say, I’m thoroughly enjoying my impromptu afternoon off. The guilt’s a bonus. With the Powers still at work and the house to myself, I make a sweet, creamy coffee, and settle on my bed with a paperback Karen Moras lent me, The Carpetbaggers. At one point I come across a line where some smuggler is described as a lone wolf, and wonder if I could fit that description, at least for this afternoon. After a few chapters typically plucked at random — beginnings always seem a waste of time — I hear a heavy rap on the front door. Handily there’s a square of frosted glass in the door to show the rough outline of callers, and this frosty visitor definitely has the rough mohair outline and buzz cut of Talbot. When his persistent knocking goes unanswered he’ll probably storm back to the pool and finish coaching, but as a double precaution I scurry into the bathroom to hide behind the shower curtain. My red parka against the curtain’s jade-green plastic is hardly best-practice camouflage, but I’m working with probability here, which is next to zero. Hang on, is that the back door I can hear being unlatched? Its tell-tale opening creak confirms it is; Talbot’s got a hide to enter my host’s home! But probability also tells me he’s unlikely to enter the bathroom, let alone pull the shower curtain back. Christ! He is in the bathroom. Can he smell me? Has he followed the fear twig-snaps of a domestic escape trail? I’m flush against the shower wall, tap handles hard against the small of my back, the odd nozzle-drip wetting my crown. I can see his smudged form through the mildew and fish motifs, so surely he sees my giveaway red-on-green. Why doesn’t he end this stupid game by ripping the curtain back and shouting aha? (Does he think I’m armed?) But no; he turns away, the back door soon creaks, the latch catches. I give him a few more minutes in case he’s waiting to spring a surprise once he hears me stir.

In the morning, Mrs Powers makes a point of accompanying me to the pool, where she’s obviously telling Talbot some lie she knows he knows is a lie, and which can only make life worse for me with Talbot. I didn’t ask her to do this, and now I’m a seventeen-year-old feeling like a seven-year-old hiding behind mother’s skirts. But I’m amazed when Talbot says absolutely nothing of our shower non-incident, a silence he maintains all week for the loudest possible contempt.