The Swim Club

by Anne De Lisle

  ‘We’ll soon find out,’ says Cate. ‘And remember, Wendy’s mate, Sharon, will ferry anyone to safety on her kayak if they find it too much.’

  My heart, already palpitating like mad, picks up its pace. I turn to Wendy. ‘Sharon? Sharon who?’

  Wendy is fiddling with her goggles, adjusting the straps, testing flexibility. ‘That’s the woman I was telling you about,’ she says, ‘the one with the kayak.’

  ‘What’s her second name?’

  Wendy hesitates. ‘I’m not sure. To be honest I don’t know her that well. Lyons. No, Lewis, I think. Yes, Lewis.’

  My heart threatens to burst clear of my rib cage.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ says Wendy.

  ‘Don’t you know who Sharon is?’ My voice is hoarse, squeaking like an adolescent boy’s. There is silent headshaking all round, though I can tell from the widening of her eyes when Laura puts two and two together. ‘Sharon’s daughter, Emma, is the child my husband, my ex-husband, made off with. Which makes me the ex-wife of the paedophile who lured Sharon’s daughter away.’

  ‘That is scarcely your fault,’ says Wendy, slipping one sinewy arm round my bare shoulders.

  ‘Perhaps not. But I’m tarred by the crime. Don’t suppose I’ll be getting pulled to safety on the kayak.’

  We hear the approach of a vehicle, see it kicking up dust as it rounds the corner, kayak strapped to roof-racks. ‘Perhaps she won’t recognise me in my cap and goggles. Put yours on too,’ I tell Karen and Laura urgently, ‘so it looks as though we’re all kitted up, ready for action.’

  I know I’m behaving like a maniac, but there’s been no time to steel myself, no time to get a grip and face this unwelcome ghost from my past with dignity. Apart from the A Current Affair footage, I haven’t seen Sharon since the immediate aftermath of the elopement. Back then I’d been completely ill-equipped to answer her ranting questions. When she appeared on my doorstep the day after the elopers had gone, demanding to know where they were, I practically slammed the door in her face. Which was probably mean-spirited of me, given her obvious distress, but at the time all I could think about was the welfare of the twins. Letting a shrill-voiced harpy into the living room, a wild-eyed vision of retribution, did not fit with my ideal of what was best for the boys. When she returned a week later, I found the fortitude to invite her into the kitchen and sit at the kitchen table with her for an hour, listening to her demands. None of which I responded to. There is no doubt in my mind that Sharon thought I’d let her down badly.

  I watch her get out of the car. Hot pink lycra singlet over her togs, matching visor. She’s very fit-looking: tanned and nuggety, short bleached hair like a surfie chick. Up close, she’s more hen than chick: a few years older than the rest of us, and weathered by a life-long love affair with the sun and surf. Though it’s over two years since I’ve seen her, I would have recognised her anywhere and doubt my disguise is going to work. When you’ve been in shocking circumstances with someone, you tend to remember it all pretty clearly. Remember a small bundle of raving fury on A Current Affair, yelling at Alec on the beach with his True Love. I wonder if she’s in contact with her daughter.

  Wendy helps Sharon unload the kayak and carry it to the water’s edge. We follow and stand in the shallows, slime oozing between our toes. I’m no longer fearing the cold. I’m no longer consumed by my dread of being swallowed by the void. Seeing Sharon is far, far worse. Introductions are performed. I lift my goggles and know she’s recognised me even before she speaks.

  ‘Charlie Tarrant,’ she says. ‘I thought you’d left town.’

  ‘Nope. Not me.’

  I’m shaking, the past threatening to rise up and engulf my tenuous grip on stability. Adam’s death might have had me reliving the memory of bitter loneliness. But what facing Sharon so unexpectedly exhumes is far, far worse. Once more, I’m experiencing the revulsion of seeing my husband hand in hand with a child. A glowing young face lifted to his. True Love.

  But none of this is Sharon’s fault. She, like me, was discarded from their lives like a piece of chaff. ‘It’s been a long time,’ I say.

  Sharon looks away, fiddles with the kayak. ‘Yes, hasn’t it?’

  It’s impossible to know what else to say. I’m conscious of the gentle lap, lap of waves against the shore, the song of a bird in the nearby bush, seconds ticking by in unnatural, excruciating slowness. It seems an eternity before Cate, all bright and breezy, comes to the rescue with, ‘Talking time later, girls, we have a job to do. Stand with your buddies.’

  I tiptoe through the ooze to Laura’s side. Cate has already explained the buddy system. We have to swim alongside our partner, who is around our own speed, breathing frequently to their side, keeping close, keeping her in sight. No one is as slow as me, I feel sorry for Laura, second slowest, having to be my buddy. Wendy and Karen are buddies. Cate will swim beside the kayak, stopping now and again to let the sluggish swimmers catch up, counting heads.

  Standing in the shallows, I’m wishing myself anywhere else on earth. Gone is the excitement, the iron-woman feeling I had last week. In its stead, I am burdened by a terrible reluctance, my entire body weighted by a thousand leaden blocks. I know I am the slowest, the most likely not to make it, but meeting Sharon again has compounded my fears to the point where my hard-won confidence has drained out of me, leaving me as weak as pond life, food for the giant eels reputed to live in these depths.

  We set off. Cate has warned us that, sometimes, in open, choppy waters, swimmers can feel seasick, even vomit. I don’t feel sick, but I feel tired and weary by the time we’re halfway. I can’t stop thinking about Alec and Emma. Had I been a better, more desirable wife, would he have left Emma alone? What was wrong with me as a woman that my husband would prefer a schoolgirl? Then I remember Laura’s wise counsel. No one’s fault but his. So many lives affected by his selfish weakness. Should be horsewhipped.

  I realise the others have all stopped and are checking our progress, treading water. Laura and I join them, and I lift up my goggles, looking around. Where once sunlight warmed homes, trees, gardens and bushland, the valley is now drowned, obliterated by a cold, black mass. Where once lambs and calves gambolled to the sound of birdsong in the meadows, now it is the silent stealthy progress of giant eels, curving and coiling blind through the frigid water. I wonder how many lower forms of life, too wild or insignificant to be gathered up from this resumed land by displaced families, perished in the rising dam waters. And where are they now, those countless creeping, wriggling, burrowing creatures? Are there thousands of tiny skeletons settled in the muddy bed far below me?

  But the wind has dropped and the sun is out, turning the surrounding hills emerald and the surface of the water to a sheet of shimmering silver. It’s impossible to ignore the hint of good feeling that’s creeping into my veins. I’m warm and weary from my exertions, yet comfortable enough after a break to know I have the strength to continue. Contentment and a burgeoning, if slightly premature, sense of achievement kicks in, awakening all those other intoxicating feelings that have previously sated us when we’ve swum in the dam.

  The Macclesfield shoreline is not so far. Every metre swum is a metre less to go. When we set off again, I know we’re going to make it. All of us. Now and again, as we draw closer, I lift my head and see the cars through the fog of my goggles, the picnic-laden cars, and think of the hot tea, the scones, muffins and home-made muesli that await us: a special spread to mark this momentous occasion.

  But my euphoria is tempered by intense consciousness of Sharon, stroking rhythmically by our sides on her kayak. I’m not going to be able to ignore her over breakfast, but I have no idea what words, if any, I’ll be able to find for her. It’s hard to see her as an injured party too, though that’s precisely what she is, perhaps because her mode of defence when hurt was to attack like a termagant. Mine was to crawl like a hermit crab into a shell of my own making and lick my wounds in silence. Pro-active versus inactive. I know Sharon thoug
ht I should have made more effort to chase the runaways, track them down and shame them. As she did. In Sharon’s eyes, I suspect I was at best apathetic, at worst an aider and abettor.

  At last I feel the clinging grip of weed on my legs and know I’ve arrived. Then we’re wading out of the water, snatching off caps and goggles. Sharon is dragging out her kayak. Wendy stoops to give her a hand. We look back towards Witney. ‘Just over two kilometres,’ says Cate.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I counted my strokes,’ she tells us.

  Out of our swimsuits, warm, dry and dressed, we fall upon our reward.

  ‘How easy was that?’ says Karen, cradling a mug of hot tea between her hands. Triumph has stripped every vestige of grief from her face: she looks ten years younger, fired up, ready to leap back in the water and do it all over again.

  ‘Easy wouldn’t be my first choice of word,’ comments Laura, and passes her a muffin.

  ‘Thanks. But surely you couldn’t call it hard.’

  ‘Challenging,’ I suggest, then glance at Sharon. I’m going to have to open my mouth to her at some stage. She and Cate are busy strapping the kayak onto the roof-racks of Laura’s car, readying it to be ferried back to the Witney car park. Their activities are giving me time to gather myself, steel myself. Perhaps if I’d known she was coming I’d have been better prepared, known what to say.

  ‘If it hadn’t been a challenge,’ says Wendy, settling onto the grassy bank by the shore, ‘we wouldn’t feel half as high as we do now. When life’s too easy, there’s no sense of achievement.’

  She’s right of course. When I think of our milk-bottle days, when I could barely swim twenty-five metres, I am astounded by how far I’ve come. Charlie Tarrant, pale, slightly chubby, pen-pushing mother of two, has kicked and pulled her way across more than two kilometres of deep, black water. How far we’ve all come. The achievement is huge. Exhilarating.

  Sharon’s kayak safely stowed, she and Cate make their way across the grass to join us. Cate has a huge grin on her face as she approaches. ‘All that driving around was a hassle,’ she says. ‘Next time let’s swim over and back.’

  Karen beams. There isn’t a murmur of complaint. Even from me. Mind you, handicapped by the all-consuming presence of Sharon, I’m not likely to start debating anything right now, let alone the merits of tackling a four-kilometre swim. I pour Cate and Sharon a mug of tea each. Wendy hands them muffins and scones.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ says Sharon, and sits down beside me.

  For several seconds I am agonisingly, excruciatingly aware of the woman at my side. Say something. I search for acceptable words, open my mouth and speak. ‘I haven’t seen you around for ages.’ It’s not startling, but it’s best I can manage.

  ‘Moved off the mountain two years ago. Don’t really come up here much any more.’ Sharon’s not quite looking at me, and I don’t know whether it’s disgust at my failure to keep my husband interested and, therefore, away from her daughter, or whether its reluctance to stare back into what must have been such a painful episode of her life.

  I catch myself looking for physical similarities between mother and daughter. The colouring for sure, a general air of sportiness perhaps. But whereas I remember Emma as long and lithe, Sharon is compact and muscly: a bulldog to Emma’s greyhound. ‘How come you and Wendy know each other?’ I ask.

  Wendy, leaning forward to top up our mugs with more tea, says, ‘My Ben used to go to Tae Kwon Do with Sharon’s son. Ben was too young really, soon got sick of it. Jonathon must be seventeen by now. How is he, Sharon?’

  I cringe at the word seventeen. Seventeen, the fateful age of a daughter’s seduction.

  Sharon doesn’t seem to have made the connection. ‘He’s in his last year at school,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t come to Macclesfield. I’ve got him at Dursley High. One of the reasons I moved house.’

  I clutch my mug of tea, aware that the panic I’m experiencing is a problem of my own creation. I’ve let myself become so morbidly sensitive that I can’t even hear the word seventeen in Sharon’s presence without cringing. I need to get a grip and behave like a well-adjusted adult. Emma must be twenty by now. A grown woman – almost – capable of making her own choices and forming her own opinions.

  I want to ask about her, but I can’t. My chest tightens at the very thought of it. ‘Thanks,’ I say instead. ‘Thanks for seeing us safely across the water, Sharon.’

  ‘That’s all right, love. I’d do it again any time. Now I might get my mouth round one of these.’ She stretches forward to pick up a buttered scone and I catch Laura’s eye. She gives me a little nod that I know is approval. Well done, she’s saying, another hurdle, another test, and you made it.

  But later, when I’m home alone and trying to work, so swamped by memories that I’m striding from room to room in agitation instead, I know Laura’s nod of approval was premature. It’s not that I envy Emma, or want Alec back in any shape or form. What’s haunting me now are those last few months with him that, at the time, seemed like a renewed youth in Alec: his grabbing me by the hand and luring me with sweet words and passionate eyes to the bedroom as soon as the twins were asleep, night after night, like we did when we were in our twenties and couldn’t get enough of each other. A second honeymoon that took on a very different slant from the moment he delivered his news and walked out of the door.

  The disgust that engulfs me when I think of what he’s done, the uncertainty over when it started, the suspicion that he must have used me to sate a lust aroused in the playground, makes me want to crouch in the shower and scrub till I’ve purged myself of the years I spent with him.

  It’s takeaway pizzas that night: organising myself to cook dinner is beyond my scattered, rattled wits. I feel like a bad mother, but the boys are in heaven.

  ‘Can we do this every week?’ asks Mikey, mouth overflowing with Meatball Bonanza.

  ‘Not if you ask me like that,’ I say. ‘Swallow your food then try again.’

  Dan, gulping down his own mouthful with the speed of a reptile, beats him to it. ‘Can we, Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know about weekly, though maybe a little more often than we do now. It’s not a very healthy way to eat, especially the sort of pizza you two order. All that barbeque sauce and chunky meat. If it is meat,’ I add, peering closer. ‘Looks an odd colour. Sort of orange with grey bits.’

  The conversation is surreal to me. A discussion of the merits of pizzas and their ingredients, when what I want to say is, Don’t grow up to use a woman badly! Never substitute one woman for another or you will pulverise her!

  Shortly after the boys have gone to bed, Laura rings. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

  I’m sitting on the sofa, surrounded by scattered chapters of my manuscript. ‘Mm.’

  ‘Seeing Sharon upset you.’

  ‘It did. Not that any of it’s her fault.’

  ‘Except the bit where she forgot to teach her daughter to keep her legs shut.’

  I laugh and Laura says, ‘That’s better. Lighten up. See the funny side – it’s there if you look hard enough.’

  I pin the phone between my head and one shoulder. ‘I’ve been way too serious about this whole business, haven’t I?’

  ‘Serious was okay to begin with, but maybe it’s time to start feeling grateful. You’ve had a lucky escape, you know. You should be kissing Sharon for giving birth to the catalyst that got rid of Alec for you. She’s like the Virgin Mary really. Mother of your saviour.’

  This draws another laugh. ‘Thanks, Laura.’

  Suddenly I feel better – nothing like a bit of laughter to shake off the self-pity – and I turn to my manuscript, my thoughts on Antonia and her powerful thighs.

  Winter wears on. Every week the water of the dam grows colder. There is dissent in the ranks.

  One day we arrive in the car park to find Laura struggling to lift a floppy black mass out of the back of her car.

  ‘Wetsuits,’ she says. ‘I got the
m at Cash Converters, so they’re all second-hand. Assorted sizes, some have arms and legs, some are sleeveless or cut off at the knee.’

  We make our selections, joking about the knee-length ones being shark-bitten as we tug straight-legged, narrow-hipped suits over our curvy bodies. We don’t realise they are designed for men until we discover empty ball pouches distending from our pubic zones.

  Giggling as we enter the water, the cold is still a shock. In my naivety I’d imagined wetsuits kept out the water. They don’t. Drysuits keep out water. Wetsuits let in a thin film between skin and rubber. Thin enough to be quickly heated by your flesh. The heated water keeps you warm.

  We round the buoys. It’s overcast, misty. Today our hills look almost Jurassic. If the valley had looked like this the first time we ventured down here, I don’t think any of us would have dared enter the water. But now we have become wild women, daunted by nothing.

  When we return to the shore, we see a bus load of Grade Sevens disgorging onto the grassy banks of the dam. It’s canoeing week at the school. We leave the water, ball pouches swinging proud. The children stare. I’m just a little bit grateful that my own children are not among them.

  A week later, we emerge from our swim to find ourselves with company once again. We are squelching through the ooze, lifting goggles from our eyes in happy anticipation of a hearty breakfast, when a low murmuring has us all swivelling around in surprise. Through the mist of the early morning, I can make out a collection of indistinct, rounded shapes, like a pod of dugongs, on the grassy bank leading down to the shore. We all stand and stare. There are noises emanating from the pod: low moans, the occasional whimper, and I quickly realise the shapes are human. They are swaddled in blankets, writhing, and making unearthly sounds.

  ‘I think it’s the rebirthers,’ whispers Wendy.

  ‘Better not disturb them,’ I mouth at the others, adding, ‘I wouldn’t like them to have a lousy birth second time, they might have to rebirth their rebirth.’