My readers expect heroines to be slender and lithe. If any of their body parts are going to be massive or magnificent, it had better be their breasts. I scent trouble in my work.
I throw myself down into a wicker armchair and gaze dully over the garden. Writing within the sanctuary of the home I love so much is usually enough to keep my head on track. It’s a place of peace and solitude, every inch of which inspires my creativity: an old Queenslander with deep verandahs shaded by a jumble of clambering roses, jasmine and honeysuckle. Writing outside is the best, curled up on this wicker chair, nourished by the scent of the garden. Sometimes I wonder if I’m greedy for sensory pleasures. I need the sounds and scents of the garden. I need the opulence of colour and pattern that clutters the house. Another compensation for being Alec-less. He’d never have agreed to live in a rambling old cottage, hated my clutter and was always on at me to chuck things out. Back then I didn’t realise I was part of the clutter he wanted to get rid of.
I close my eyes and lean back in the chair. Left to my own devices, I’ve created a home that’s a kaleidoscope of voluptuous fabrics: botanic patterns, stripes, flecks and splodges: any permutation of shape and design as long as the colours are deep and rich. I open one eye and look through the open French doors to the living room. Rugs I’ve collected for years cover the floors, and the walls are adorned with paintings, photos, chalk and crayon creations from the twins’ early years, and dozens of questionable watercolours from the days when I dreamed of learning to paint. And into any square inch of space I’ve somehow neglected to fill, I’ll cram a jug of whatever I can reap from the scented jungle outside. A chaotic bower of gorgeous clutter, as Laura terms my style of decorating. She also calls it an Act of Defiance. She’s right, but then she usually is. Countless times I’ve punched a nail in the wall to hang yet another painting with a take that, and that, as I’ve added another six jugs to my collection on the dresser. It’s the sort of environment that shouts eccentric female, the sort of lonely, aged woman with a house full of cats. I’m not quite aged yet, and I don’t have a cat, but that’s coming, I’m sure. My environment is my muse and my muse seldom lets me down.
Lately, however, all has not been going well. I’m experiencing a sudden desire to empower my heroine and make her do the rescuing. I want to lock a lily-livered young man in a tower and have Antonia and her awesome thighs burst in and rescue him. Whether she keeps him at her side thereafter is another matter. She might have her way with him, straddling him with quadriceps of iron, then cast him aside and move on.
I experienced similar troubles when Alec first left. Not that my heroines grew dauntingly strong in those days. Oh no, the opposite was the case then. My heroines did their best to be such frail, worthless creatures that no man in his right mind would want them.
Such a fine balance, creating heroine and hero. Gone is the popularity of the vacuous virgin. Readers today expect more from their heroines. They expect beauty and virtue, but also strength of character, wit, courage and intelligence. Heroes, of course, must be matchless in their might, but human and flawed enough to be credible. Where, oh where are my role models?
I hear the front door bang open and know the boys are home. Mikey and Dan are eleven year-old identical twins who, physically at least, are clones of their father. Long and lean with dark brown hair and startlingly blue eyes. The boys don’t like their eyes. They think they’re girlish. I think they’re beautiful.
‘Milo?’ I call out.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
I hear the double thud of school bags hitting the floor, and seconds later the boys lope into the kitchen. The fridge door is yanked open and its contents slung across the table. They make sandwiches, rifling through the biscuit tin as they go, and they drink milk straight from the carton while waiting for their Milo to cool.
It’s the same routine every afternoon and it’s a highlight of my day. Certainly, there are times when the boys exasperate me and test my patience to breaking point: when I can’t enter their rooms for the knee-deep mess, when they bicker and squabble, or sulk at bedtime when I won’t give in to their demands to watch South Park. But more than compensating for this is the look on Mikey’s face when he wins a high-jump ribbon, or Dan gets a Reader of the Week award. There’s the animation of their play, and their debates when they’re dissecting a film or a book: debates unspoilt by cynicism.
I swear I can see the boys grow with every fistful of food they cram into their hungry mouths. Lately I’ve noticed that they’re not quite as thin as they were, which can only mean an imminent upward growth spurt. Like swelling seeds, they are poised to erupt into sudden, vertical growth. And, as always, for me, there’s the thought that Alec was mad, is mad, to be missing these irreplaceable years.
I sit at the table and sip from my cup. ‘Is Jeremy back at school yet?’
Jeremy is Karen’s eldest. For all her assurances that the kids are doing well, she’s been really unsure when to start them back again. Perhaps hoping to protect them from other kids’ curiosity.
‘Yep.’
‘How’s he doing?’
‘Good.’
There’s never much conversation during the three-thirty feeding frenzy.
CHAPTER 6
I TRAIN THE TWINS TO catch the school bus without me. I pack their lunches the night before and stash them in the fridge. Each night when they go to bed, I set alarm clocks in their rooms, and try to explain to them how important this swimming business has become to me. I feel like a bad, bad mother, and am saddened to suspect that the boys are excited by their new independence. I compensate for my badness by always being at home when the bus gets in at three-thirty.
The girls and I settle into a routine of five swimming classes a week. We swim Monday to Friday in sun and rain, gales and fog. We swim on the coldest of mornings without complaint. We swim on the busiest of days and after the latest of nights. We swim when we have coughs, colds, periods, and anything else that could vaguely be used as an excuse.
Sean drives us ruthlessly. He uses a stopwatch to time us. He makes us do tricky training exercises like catch-up, a form of water torture that ought to be banned. We have to swim freestyle, but touching one outstretched hand to the other with every stroke. Wendy’s brilliant at it, with her precise, measured style, her attention to detail that’s obsessive – if you want my opinion. As for me, by the time I get out of the pool my arms feel a good six inches longer. I’m a knuckle-dragging missing link of a primate, shuffling to the changing room.
We also learn to use pool buoys, which are blocks of foam rubber shaped like a solid figure eight; we clamp them between our thighs so that our legs are immobilised, then we have to swim using only our arms. A nightmare, seeing as I still rely so much on my kick. At first I go slowly enough to drift sideways, backwards, anywhere but forwards. Breathing is all but impossible. But progress is steady, and I’m astonished to find myself actually improving. My arms are never going to be as strong as Wendy’s – God, when I think of those chin-ups my mouth still falls open – but they have discovered a rhythm. And suddenly we are measuring our swims in kilometres instead of laps. Our fitness increases and our skin colour deepens – even mine, the startling white acquiring a pale golden tint. Laura and Wendy grow cinnamon brown, and Karen, with her Mediterranean genes, turns dark as a nut.
But it’s not all about muscles, fitness and suntans. There is the major issue of Pool Hygiene to get my squeamish stomach around. Charlie Tarrant, Queen of Nausea, who gets queasy watching episodes of General Hospital, encountering human detritus on a daily basis. Magnified by my state-of-the-art goggles, it’s impossible to miss: human hair, the odd grubby bandaid, and other mysterious substances with just a little more viscosity than the pool water.
Of course the primary school kids pee liberally in the pool during their afternoon sessions. But when I comment about this one morning in the changing room, express how glad I am to do the morning session when the filter has had all night to perform its
business, Laura says, ‘It’s not the pee you need to worry about. Urine’s harmless, like salty water …’ She trails off theatrically. I grow cold.
‘Go on then,’ prompts Karen, ‘what do we need to fear?’
‘You don’t want to know.’ Laura sits down to dab talc on her feet, teasing us with deliberate evasion.
‘Yes we do,’ says Wendy. ‘We need to know.’
‘Okay.’ Laura tosses the talc in the direction of her bag. It hits the mountain of contents and rolls off onto the floor. Our eyes don’t budge from her face. ‘It’s the mucus,’ she says. ‘Horrible stuff. Filled with all sorts of nasties. Like pus.’
Mucus. Nice word. I sit down on the bench and apply myself to the task of drying my feet. Don’t want to grow fungus between my toes. Fungus. Mucus. I catch Laura’s eye and see a gleam of amusement. The weakness of my stomach has long been a source of entertainment in her life. I feel like chucking my towel at her.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ she says, ‘you’ll just have to dodge it.’
So how does one dodge mucus in the pool? Does mucus dissolve in water, becoming so diluted I’ll never know when I swim through it? Or, like oil, does it not mix with water, does it hang suspended in clotted strands, like jellyfish tentacles to wrap across my face, to enter my unguarded mouth and nose? I’m going to have to try really hard to keep my mouth shut when I’m under water, try not to think mucus at all.
One day I’m doing breaststroke. There’s a man also doing breaststroke swimming towards me. Unsophisticated breaststroke, I notice smugly, with his head clear of the water. He draws closer and suddenly, through the fog of my goggles, I see draped from his nostril and attached to one shoulder is something resembling a green rope. It’s a struggle not to throw up. I close my eyes and take deep breaths. Mustn’t add vomit to the water. Must find the courage to deal with this if I’m going to become a serious swimmer. It’s at moments like these that the idea of joining Elsa’s rebirthing class beckons as a fine alternative. Snuggled in a clean blanket doing weird breathing and panting, but at no stage immersed in the bodily excretions of strangers.
I arrive late for swimming one day. Cate the Goddess is stretching at the shallow end of the pool just as I’m about to lower myself in. There is a woman, a decade or so older than me, swimming up and down in the slow lane with a snorkel.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ says Cate, following my gaze. ‘That lady has an arthritic neck. She can’t turn her head properly. You shouldn’t be looking that way for your inspiration, you should look over there.’ She points to the mysterious sleek bodies cutting up and down the fast lanes.
‘Who are those people?’ I ask.
‘Triathletes.’
Laura, touching the end of the pool where I’m sitting, is in time to hear the word. She lifts up her goggles. ‘Triathletes. Wouldn’t it be amazing? Imagine. There go Laura and Charlie. They’re triathletes, you know.’
‘It’s not so far-fetched,’ says Cate, and hops onto the edge of the pool in one sleek, long-limbed movement, dodging Wendy and Karen who are pulling up too. ‘It’s not like you have to compete in the Hawaii Ironman or anything like that. There are plenty of short-course triathlons around, mini events and novice events. I’ve done a few.’
I know the others are as much in awe of Cate’s grace and athleticism as I am, and it’s clear her motivational words are catching their interest. But for me it might as well be Neil Armstrong saying, Hey, tripping to the moon’s a whole lot of fun, you should do it sometime. Right. Put me through the paces of an astronaut. Strap me to one of those vomitinducing spinning machines. Turn me upside down and fling me about to see how I do controlling my vertigo, my nausea. Pit me against NASA’s best. Piece of cake. ‘Slightly different for you,’ I say. ‘You’re young and fit. You look like a triathlete.’
Cate laughs as she pulls off her hat and goggles. ‘I’ve seen men and women twice your age competing. There are veterans’ categories for people over the age of eighty.’ She heads for the changing room: lithe, muscled and cat-like. Halfway there she stops and calls out over one shoulder, ‘You just need to get a few more kilometres under your belts.’
‘I want to do it,’ says Karen later, back in the changing room. ‘I want us all to do it.’
Just when I’m getting on top of one thing, why does there always have to be another? I’ve learned to swim. God, I’ve even learned to swim through mucus. Now Karen wants me to cycle and run. Or does she? Perhaps she’s not serious. ‘I assume you’re kidding,’ I say.
There’s silence. I look up. Oh God, she’s not.
‘No. We can. Listen …’ She wriggles into her little denim shorts and jumps to her feet, way ahead of everyone else for once. Excitement is driving her, putting a spring in her step and returning a long dormant gleam to her eye. ‘You know how important it is to have goals. This is something to aim for, to strive for, and it’s only the swimming that’s an issue. Any fool can cycle a few kilometres and run a couple. If we get tired we can walk it.’
Yeah right, I think, any old fool but this one. I decide all that chlorine must have gone to her head. But watching Karen jump with enthusiasm before the reluctant rest of us I can’t help feeling humbled. Bereaved Karen, who has every right to be raging at the fates for crippling her happiness with a single fell swoop. Or perhaps the courage we are seeing is not despite her tragedy but a consequence of it. Perhaps Karen has learned in the harshest way imaginable that as you never can know what’s around the next corner, or what may strike you down next week, next day, next second; every moment must be seized. Only I’m not sure I want to seize this one.
But as I start to dress, I remember how afraid I felt when the idea of learning to swim was first raised. Back then, the will of the majority swept me along. That, and the desire to help Karen. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how right the girls were, and I’m deeply grateful to have been carried along by them, not to have been left behind, paralysed by belief in my own limitations.
But do we really need to do this in order to grow? Or is she just trying to cram a lifetime’s experience into her immediate future because she no longer trusts that she’ll have a future? I want to believe her, I want to grow, but do we have to torture ourselves half to death in the process?
‘Come on, girls,’ urges Karen. ‘It won’t be that hard. And there’s no hurry. We can train for another year if we want.’ It’s a joy to witness the light on her face, the bounce in her step, to glimpse that confident, bolt-upright posture. I sense a weakening of resistance in the damp air of the changing room.
Laura, dressed for work and ready to go, pauses at the door and says, ‘I have to visit a hospital patient before clinic. See you girls in the morning.’ After a brief hesitation, she adds, ‘Count me in.’
I try not to groan as we wave her off. If anyone might have shared my qualms, it would have been Laura.
Wendy, slipping her perfumed basket over one arm, says, ‘You know, Cate’s probably right. I bet there are plenty of plodding amateurs in these events.’
‘I’d need a snorkel,’ I say. ‘Not to mention a paramedic or two.’
I button up my sensible, long-sleeved, designed-for-maximum-sun-protection shirt, and the three of us saunter out to the car park. The girls think I’m kidding of course, cracking jokes about paramedics. They look happy, satisfied that a fine decision’s been made. It’s in the bag, a fait accompli. Look out triathlon – here we come. We are almost in the car park when I realise I’ve left my cap and goggles behind. ‘See you tomorrow,’ I say, and dash back.
My cap and goggles are where I left them, dangling on a hook above the bench. I wrap them up in my towel and shove everything into my bag. I’m hurrying because I plan to spend the morning in the library getting some more background information for Antonia’s journey. My brain is already somewhere in fourteenth century Scotland as I round the exit corner of the changing room. Which is the excuse I allow myself for walking blindly into a large b
right-orange T-shirt.
‘Sorry,’ I say to bright-taste-in-T-shirt man, ‘wasn’t looking where I was going.’
‘No problem,’ he says. ‘It’s the chlorine. Affects the eyes.’
And don’t my eyes feel better now. ‘Yes,’ I ruffle my wet hair, ‘I have been swimming rather a lot lately.’
As have you, I realise with a bit of a gut lurch. Goggles dangle from the fingers of one brown hand, a towel is under one oversized muscly arm, and his short black hair is sleek and damp as an otter’s.
This man was not in the snorkeller’s lane, nor was he in our plodding lane. This is a creature from the fast lane, a tumble-turning powerhouse of a swimmer.
He walks to the car park with me, and I’m suddenly uncoordinated and awkward, conscious that my pale pudgy skin clearly marks me as an amateur. Wendy and Karen are pulling out of the car park. They toot and wave. I pretend not to know them.
‘Perfect beginning to the day, isn’t it,’ says my companion. ‘Can’t imagine starting out without some kind of exercise.’
This man is tall enough to hurt your neck when you look up at him, built like a Greek god. Dark enough to be Greek, or Trojan, I muse. Like Eric Bana as Hector. I realise I’m staring, and search my head for some easy words. ‘I feel the same,’ I say, ‘a swim wakes you up, gets you going.’
‘Certainly does.’
‘Though it is a bit time-consuming. I always have to hurry back to my kids or they’ll never make the school bus.’ Silently I apologise to my newly independent boys for the lie. Couldn’t I have thought of something better to say?
‘I know,’ he says. ‘Same problem here.’
His words surprise me. ‘But isn’t your wife at home? I mean, won’t she get them ready? Your children, that is, onto the bus?’ Assuming you’re married. God almighty. Did I really just ask him if he was married? I can’t believe it slipped out, and I’m aware of that familiar dreaded heat that starts at my chest and travels up my throat over my face and into my hairline until I’m totally scarlet.
The Swim Club Page 5