A Boy in the Water

by Tom Gregory

  ‘Now, Tefal. Don’t go off too quickly,’ he began. ‘Conditions are good, so just settle in and find your rhythm. Let’s get past Storrs and up to the island first up.’

  ‘OK, John.’

  Storrs Temple lay just beyond the 4 mile point in the southern half of the lake – a Victorian folly at the end of its own causeway that jutted out from the eastern shoreline. A mile or so north was the chain ferry, then the network of islands, collectively called Belle Isle after the largest of them. If we got that far then the 4.5 miles to Ambleside was a possibility.

  The duck ripples had gone so it was up to me to break the glass-like surface of the water. The mist swirled around my ankles and calves as I walked in. It was perfectly quiet as I stood in the water up to my knees. My head shook gently and involuntarily from side to side in a ‘no’ motion. The task in front of me was now real, and unwelcome, mostly because the water was so cold, but also because I knew that it would be horrid in the end. Horrid to push myself to the point of failure, and likely even more horrid to refuse to give in. John’s voice cut the silence from the boat, which sat idle in the mist, with its two blue and white flags now hoisted but lying limp in the still air.

  ‘Tefal, stop fannying around, will you? Let’s fuckin’ go, lad.’ His loud voice felt like a violation of the moment and surroundings – no choice but to comply.

  I swallowed my fear. If we reached Storrs in a few hours’ time, the lake would have changed; there would be speed-boats, sailing yachts and day-tripping steam ships plying back and forth. The wind would be up, skidding down from the fells above, teasing up the lake’s surface. All stillness would be gone. But in this moment, everything was tranquil and calm, save for my heart, thudding away in my chest.

  I swam off quietly, making as little splash as possible upon entry – a mark of respect to the setting. Moments later I was up with the prow of the old wooden boat, and although I could not see the effect for myself, I imagined parting the mist with my arms and bright orange rubber-lined head – a miniature icebreaker ship inching forwards on low revs.

  No one on the boat was paying me any attention whatsoever, but I didn’t mind. Each of them was in their own world as I studied them, busy with unspoken jobs and responsibilities. JC was on the oars. Spike was tasked to serve some tea out of one of the hot flasks. John was making notes on his clipboard as he studied the conditions around us, settling in to another long day on the lake. I felt a pang of envy; as I ventured further out into the middle and transitioned through the isotherms the lake was becoming progressively colder. The transitions between the seams of water were sudden – like flipping the temperature dial on the shower from warm to cold. I knew from my map, which I had memorized, that in a mile or two we would enter the deepest and coldest part of the southern section. The action of the glaciers millions of years before had formed the deepest parts of the lake in the north and south sections, while the stubborn geology of the middle zone caused a network of islands to remain in situ halfway up its length.

  I swam as smoothly as I could through the mist. I thought I felt the back-pressure of an eddy of water turning in the small of my back, but probably just imagined it. I concentrated on the shape of the water rolling back on itself in a circular motion as I glided gently across its surface. Underwater the scene was changing rapidly as the first of the sun’s rays popped over the ridgeline. As I faced downwards and forwards, breathing out smoothly, the grease on my arms flashed bright white against the blackness of the water below. Swirling vertical blades of tiny bubbles were being formed in the wake of my forearms, and the grease was starting to form a pattern as it gradually broke down and was shaped on my skin by the repetitive angle of motion through the water. Miniature and momentary underwater shadows appeared behind my fingers and hands as they blocked the rays of sunshine, which were now being diffused into spears of light beneath the surface.

  Then, almost between breaths, the mist was gone – replaced by a new texture as thousands of tiny wavelets rippled gently in the same direction. There must be the faintest of breezes. The spell had been broken and the blue and white flags began to fidget in acknowledgement.

  In the above-water world there was some activity: John was bent down, rummaging below the topside of the rowing boat for something out of sight to me from the waterline. A large thermometer appeared in his hands, encased in its plastic tube. He tied it to a lanyard of bright orange string before releasing it overboard to trail a metre or two behind the boat. Was this a reaction to something I had done? I realized I was swimming faster and breathing more heavily – an automatic reflex to hitting colder water. John was paying attention.

  The thermometer was retrieved after a few minutes, and a note made on the clipboard. Some ham acting began on the boat, with faces being pulled for my benefit. JC furrowed his eyebrows and made an ‘Ooooooh!’ expression with his mouth, as if to convey that a moment of calamity had befallen me – the sort of wincing face you might pull when seeing someone fall off a bike. Spike did the same while wrapping his arms around himself as if to shelter from the cold. ‘You’re not the cold one,’ I said to myself underwater. At the point John joined in the charade I gave the reaction that they always intended, and shook my head as I swam, smiling as I did so. The game was simply for them to laugh at my misfortune at being in such a cold lake in the first place, and for me to laugh back both at their teasing and at my inability to prevent it. It’s quite hard to smile normally when breathing during front crawl, but the contorted change to my facial expression gave them a reaction all the same. The whole point of the exercise was to get my attention, to calm me down, and so gradually reduce my pace to be sustainable. Not a word was shared between us.

  The teasing stopped, and after a few more minutes of intense swimming, I was warm again – for now at least. Slowly I let myself sink into a private world of thoughts and songs. I realized John had prepared me for this and so I welcomed the moment, in the same way I sometimes enjoyed knowingly falling asleep. I had learned that conquering the emotional isolation of long swims was the hardest part. A six hour up-and-down session on Easter Sunday in the big pool at Eltham, on my own and with no one looking on (John was in his office doing paperwork), had been particularly upsetting. In particular I remembered powerful cravings for food – an illegal Big Mac dominating the fantasy. Windermere, and the company of the boat and crew, was better by far – anything was better than six hours in the pool. It might be cold, but at least there was some company here.

  A sudden roar of ear-splitting noise jolted me out of my thoughts and I swallowed water when I meant to breathe. I felt the thunder of the two fighter jets vibrate through the water as they passed overhead. Looking back, I just caught sight of them and the after-glow of their flaming engines as they zoomed southwards at a worryingly low height above the lake. I looked up at the boat for sympathy. ‘Get on with it, Tefal,’ was John’s reply to my silent look.

  … Then there was music to keep me company. Anna said that I was lucky to hang around with older kids, because I would know more about music, especially what was cool. By 1987 the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy had released their first albums, and acid house was creeping in at the margins of the mainstream. To have a copy on tape of any of these was to have street cred. A three-way battle between chart music, hip hop and dance was being played out daily on the minibus, but the girls, and pop, normally won. I thought this was good given that singing when swimming was more suited to melody than rap. And also because the rap stuff was hard for me to follow. The tune of the summer was already deep in my head to the point where I would sing it without even realizing: Owen Paul’s ‘Favourite Waste of Time’. Nothing else came close, so I sang it as I swam, and thought about Miss Piggy, because that crush was going nowhere for a while yet.

  A sharp pain. Top of my right thigh but close to my hip. Like a needle being inserted. Came and went.

  … Anna also pointed out that music and clothes were linked; hip hop fans (mostly boys) wore Ad
idas trainers because Run-DMC did. And thanks to Mike D, VW car badges in the car parks surrounding Windermere beauty spots were suddenly at risk of theft thanks to the enthusiasm of one of the Beastie Boys for wearing one on a chain around his neck. I often worried that I didn’t own any cool clothes but I told myself that Sergio Tacchini and Fila tracksuits were hard to get in small sizes.

  The pain was back. This time it stayed. Still sharp, same place, but increasing, as if I had to do something different to release it, to make it go away. My head twisted in pain at the spasm. This must be cramp. So that’s what it felt like.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said John, dropping the oars with a worried look. I had stopped swimming.

  ‘The top of my leg hurts, John … quite … bad,’ I replied with a grimace.

  ‘Right, now listen to me,’ said John calmly but firmly, the omission of my nickname making the moment more significant. ‘You are doing really well … REALLY well,’ he emphasized, ‘so now I want you to kick it out for a mile. It’s just a small cramp so you need to kick it out of your legs. It will go if you kick it out,’ he stressed again, ‘but if you don’t, it will come back. Understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Understand?’ John always demanded a reply.

  ‘Yes.’

  I wondered if the cramp was because John had altered my stroke recently. Two years ago and back in the confines of the small pool I was taught to swim with three leg kicks to every arm stroke on front crawl, but this year John had asked me to get used to kicking just one leg for every arm. He said that the power in my stroke needed to be from my arms, and that my leg kicks needed to reduce to make the stroke sustainable over long distances. Easter Sunday in the pool had been all about bedding that in, and for a long period, I found that although I needed an extra little half kick for balance as my body rotated on each arm, it suited me nicely and was indeed less tiring.

  ‘We’re at Storrs. Only a mile and a bit before Belle Isle. So let’s fuckin’ go, shall we?’ he beamed.

  With the oars still at rest and neither I nor the boat moving, my view of the surrounding lake had momentarily altered. There behind the boat, less than 100 metres away, was the angular folly of Storrs Temple, standing watchful and immovable at the end of its causeway. The little stone castle, a monument to what I had no idea, was guarding entry to all that wished to proceed north beyond it; onwards, to Belle Isle and to the middle and upper reaches of the lake. Not everyone was successful at negotiating a passage past Storrs – I thought of Bear, only last year, and, worryingly, all because of cramp.

  I swam on. The Fighting Fantasy books I liked to read, in fact the only books I had the patience to read, were ones whose front cover promised ‘a story where YOU become the hero’. They came with a special dice to roll at key moments, which instructed the reader which page and, ultimately after enough plays, which final outcome to turn to. It was possible to start the book many times over and read a different story every time, even if the end result was binary: live or die, victory or defeat. ‘You are at the gates to Storrs Temple,’ it might have read. ‘Roll the dice … If you roll odd, turn to section 152’ (… and die soon afterwards of cramp to the upper leg). ‘If you roll even, turn to section 175’ (… and proceed past the ancient chain ferry to the mysterious Land of Belle Isle …). I rolled even, and followed John’s additional instructions, legs re-set at 3:1, for now.

  A while later the oars stopped on the boat and Spike, who faced rearwards while rowing, was looking over his shoulder. This always indicated a hazard ahead, and so I looked up and to the front on a few successive breaths to see what was going on, not breaking my stroke. The chain ferry was clanking past in front of me, and I considered the likelihood of swimming into the chain itself – a submerged tripwire. The ferry was full of cars and tourists, some of whom wore cameras around their necks, poised to capture a moment of Lakeland beauty. A young girl tugged at one of her parents and pointed at me; the adult brought up the lens and snapped me treading water as I looked back at them, waiting for the ferry to pass.

  Unexpectedly the water warmed up. Long weeds reached up from the depth of the dark lake beneath and brushed my hands below the surface as I swam. The fat, slimy tentacles startled me when I first touched one. I could see a good couple of metres of their length running vertically down through the clear water, but after that they descended into blackness, to a depth I could only guess. A scene from Star Wars unhelpfully entered my head; the one where the heroes are enclosed in a wet tank full of space junk, while the tentacles of a submerged monster attempt to drown them by dragging them under the surface of the water. They got away with it, being Jedi, but I banished the thought all the same.

  ‘TEEEFAL!’ I heard on the next breath. I stopped swimming. ‘Yes?’ I replied, calling up from the water, wondering what could have caused John to interrupt the rhythm of things.

  ‘A buoy, Tefal! … A buoy! Look!’ he announced with glee. There, a few metres in front, was a large orange marker buoy. There were many more of them in this part of the lake but even this one would have taken some aiming at by the crew in order to have got quite so close. The buoys marked shallow water and other submerged hazards, identifying the safe channels for boats passing between the islands. This one, like most, was covered in white and black bird shit. The white stuff was the fresh shit. The black stuff was the ever-accumulating undercoat. What followed had become a drill – but not one I liked. I said nothing and simply swam forwards to the large orange ball. I butted it gently with my forehead, hoping this would look like the act of humiliation it was supposed to be from behind. ‘NO, TEFAL!’ shouted John. ‘You need to actually KISS the buoy … You know the rules.’ Unable and unwilling to protest, I kissed the thing. It was slimy and firm. I looked back, to check I had passed the test. The crew were rolling with laughter. John waved me away with some urgency as Spike picked up the oars, so I resumed, shoulders aching.

  There was no one there at Belle Isle. I sat in the water up to my chest alongside the rowing boat. John handed me a jam sandwich, Roberts’s strawberry on thick white bread. I ate it quickly. There was a plastic thermos-lid cup of milky sweet tea. As I sipped it the warmth of the liquid felt as if a hot water pipe running through my body had been turned on. It was the most intense feeling of relief I had ever experienced. The chocolate digestives came next, then a refill of the tea.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked John.

  ‘OK,’ I said evenly. Each syllable of the word came out of my mouth slower than I had expected. They sounded sluggish. Perhaps I was colder than I had thought in my core, but I was not really cold. I didn’t want to say much else anyway. Because I was upset.

  ‘Are you cold?’ asked John after a pause.

  ‘Erm … No. Not really,’ I said honestly, again sounding a little simple as my lips struggled to wrap themselves around the words. ‘… Not cold.’ I left something hanging.

  ‘What is it then, Tefal? Why are you sulking?’ asked John, a note of provocation in his tone.

  I chewed on the remnants of the second digestive, impervious to the insult.

  ‘Where is everybody?’ I said, as fast as my lips allowed, which was slowly.

  ‘They’re not here. You won’t see them until we reach the end.’

  I chewed some more.

  ‘Why not?’ Some biscuit crumbs spilled from my numb lips into the water.

  John held the rail of the boat and leaned in to me, locked his eyes on mine. ‘Because we are an hour early, Tefal, that’s why,’ he said quietly, and smiled.

  ‘Tefal, stay with the FUCKIN’ boat, will you? For fuck’s sake!’ Some time, probably an hour or more, had passed, but my condition had deteriorated quickly. I was well past my cold and distance threshold and experiencing the darkest side of long distance swimming for the first time. I didn’t reply because I couldn’t speak. The boat had veered back towards me to re-establish the appropriate distance between us, and so taken itself from the line of shortest distance to th
e end point. I had to follow the boat, not the other way round, otherwise we would certainly fail. We resumed.

  Clunk.

  ‘Shit,’ I mumbled underwater, opening my eyes once more, this time in sudden pain. I had swum underneath the oar and taken a knock to the head. It hurt. Spike should have held the stroke out of the water but probably took his eye off me for a moment. We had been out there for hours now so I couldn’t blame him. Things were unravelling. I was very cold. I looked up to see if we had passed the White Hotel in what felt like the last hour. There it sat on the eastern shore, unmoved, staring back at me obstinately. In that moment the tears came. This was the moment then. To give up.

  John intervened, hoping to regain some control.

  ‘Tefal. Listen to me, lad. You are a mile and a half from Ambleside.’ I shook my head in reply as I bobbed alongside the boat. John could see I was crying, rather than making any attempt to speak.

  ‘Look up,’ he commanded instead, and pointed northwards. I could see the masts and rooftops of Ambleside again, just like last year. A chocolate digestive was retrieved from the plastic box and tossed into the lake for me to eat. Like a desperate duck in the park I grabbed for it before it sank, and ate it down. A mile and a half then. I decided I was going in. It would be horrible but, stroke by stroke, I was going in.

  That night I sat in the deckchair reserved for the swimmer for just the second time as we all gathered in the food tent for dinner, still tinned mince, fresh mash and tinned marrowfat peas, with creamed rice for pudding too. Only now was I returning to a reasonably alert state of mind. It was taking a long time for the effects of the swim to leave me, even though I had been out of the water for six hours. Not so much the cold, because I was warm now, but more the effect on my brain, only just resuming normal operating speed after what I now knew to be six hours and five minutes of solitude and cold immersion.