Floating

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Floating Page 9

by Joe Minihane


  One by one the cousins came forward, climbing high, the entire makeshift creation swaying violently as they stood, fingertips pointing to the sky before diving forward. John’s efforts were spectacular, but Mark’s eleven-year-old twin daughters were incredible, unafraid of toppling in and clearly loving the cold crash of the Avon around them. They went in turns, practising tumbles, tucks and somersaults, as if jumping from a creaking alloy tower was the most normal thing in the world. I had found myself in a watery paradise.

  That was, until it was my turn. I scaled the makeshift construction slowly, again watched by the extended family, grins and shouts of encouragement abounding. They’d seen my near-disastrous window leap and they were ready for more light entertainment. I made no mention of the fact that I didn’t particularly enjoy heights, particularly ones where it involved throwing myself off and into the unknown. I remembered the brief feeling of fearlessness I’d found in the window frame and let myself half jump, half flop into the river.

  It was a pathetic effort, considering the rest of the talent on show. John filmed it all on his smartphone, and I cringed as I watched myself back, a 31-year-old man shown up by a bunch of kids who’d never known fear of the water.

  Over lunch, I asked George about any recent travails with the Environment Agency. Apart from an attempt to string oil barrels across the adjacent weir to prevent anyone falling down it, everything had gone quiet. No one other than the family swam in this stretch of the Avon much, George said, and recent problems with flood defences, coupled with crippling government cuts, meant the Environment Agency had better things to do than hassle a few swimmers exercising their inalienable right to a dip.

  Before being allowed to swim off upstream, George and the boys insisted I try out one of their coracles. It felt as if they wanted to show me everything this magical place had to offer, and I was powerless to resist. I could quite happily have hunkered down and spent the rest of my summer here – swimming, daydreaming and listening to England edge out the Aussies on the radio.

  John pulled out a larger vessel and told me this was one of the easier coracles to pilot and impossible to fall out of, demonstrating the figure of eight movement needed to propel it forward. I plonked myself in and immediately started paddling backwards, spinning in circles before being taken away upstream by a gust of wind. Despite my best efforts, I found myself heading for the rush of a nearby lock gate. Shamefaced, I called for help. One of the cousins powered across in a kayak with a length of rope and towed me back to shore. If I did stay, I was going to need to practise this waterborne art at length.

  By now I was ready for a long dip. I slipped in at the weir and swam slowly against the current towards a distant road bridge. ‘Swimming is often enhanced by company, and sometimes by solitude,’ Roger wrote of his visit. I had enjoyed some beautifully social swims in recent weeks, none more so than my morning spent here in the Vale of Evesham. It was wonderful to be surrounded by so many people who loved the water and didn’t find swimming outside to be a subversive activity, but rather a wholly natural one. But I felt an overwhelming need to digest it all, take it in on my own and feel the sun scorch my back as I did so.

  The Avon wasn’t especially warm despite the late July heat, and I felt the cold touch my heart, reminding me of its presence with every stroke. At a cedar tree on the near bank I turned back and swam through a bunch of ducks, who quacked and fussed out of my path.

  Beautifully manicured lawns fell away from stunning homes towards the Avon’s banks, but none were so alluring as the majestic mill up ahead. The water surrounding it was alive with people. The kids were still on the diving board and coracles zipped back and forth around them as they fell in one by one. A kayak, piloted by Mark, disappeared over the weir to the distant sound of whoops and cheers. It was delightful to realise that whether I was here or not, these antics would carry on regardless. Swimming was essential to this family and I was overjoyed that in the intervening years between mine and Roger’s trips, little had changed to spoil this perfect summer scene.

  — PART TWO —

  The Break

  ‘I longed to swim the lochs and wild islands, and at last I felt ready to cross over the sea to Jura.’

  ROGER DEAKIN, WATERLOG

  CHAPTER ONE

  August

  River Lark, Cambridgeshire – The Oasis, Covent Garden – River Wissey, Norfolk

  Lifted by the solitude of my swim along the Avon and the marvellous company in the hours beforehand, I decided to head out on a longer solo jaunt. I was off on a mission to baptise myself and be born again in the River Lark near Isleham.

  The Lark had been known as a place where Baptists were totally immersed, what Roger called a kind of River Jordan in the heart of the Fens. On the map it looked like any other river in this flat landscape. This was a place where the map was devoid of cramped contour lines, where the eye stretched for miles over empty fields.

  My mood turned grey thanks to the gunmetal clouds that hung low over London as my train trundled out of King’s Cross towards Ely. I had brought my bike with me and resolved to cycle to my solo baptismal. I arrived in the cathedral city in a proper grump and saddled up for what I had hoped would be a pleasant change from the ceaseless fear of riding through central London. My trip from Camberwell to the train station that morning had involved being sandwiched between two swaying double-deckers on Waterloo Bridge and almost being driven off the road by an oblivious cabbie on the Strand.

  I was disabused of any notion I’d had of bucolic calm when I was overtaken by three HGVs in quick succession, each one almost pulling me into its speedy slipstream. I finally turned off onto a quieter road only to witness someone overtake on a blind bend, leaving me pedalling into a bank of nettles for safety.

  I reached the village of Prickwillow exhausted, my thighs screaming from the bumpy tarmac and woeful driving. I cursed the fact that, although we were supposed to be a nation of reborn cyclists, this activity was still seen as somehow subversive, for weirdos and eco-warriors who could be bullied by petrolheads with a taste for brinkmanship. It did nothing for my feelings of frustration at this whole Waterlog trip becoming an out of control adventure, one I’d seemingly never finish at my current rate. I had started it as an escape from work, and on days like this, with the weather bad and the water distant and hard to reach, it felt like it was nothing but a chore to be undertaken, a series of boxes to be ticked. I wondered if the whole thing was a pointless exercise, especially if I was just going to make myself angry and het up. Jumping out of mill windows and frolicking in coracles felt very distant as the August chill intensified.

  I knew that the bike, and by extension those who’d nearly had me off the road, were to blame for these dark thoughts. But I allowed myself to brood on them nonetheless. What exactly was I hoping to achieve here? And was I even getting close to learning new things about the places I visited, beyond what Roger had done? I honestly had no idea, and this was starting to worry me. Was this whole thing nothing more than a vanity project, a way of escaping day-to-day reality? What would happen when the swims ended and I had no specific goal to keep me coming back, searching for that feeling of peace and escape which I always found in the water? My mind raced away with me as I began the final stretch of the ride to the Lark.

  After a tedious pedal along flat, featureless roads, I finally turned off and headed down Soham Tunnel Drive to my chosen immersion spot. After passing a derelict hut I pushed my bike for the last hundred metres, over a grassy levee built up to protect the surrounding fields from flooding. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a huge sense of being alone. The solitude I had enjoyed on the Avon had been tempered by the fact that I could see my fellow swimming fanatics playing downstream. Here, my only company was a family of great crested grebes, who eyed me cautiously as they swam off into a pool to the side of the river. Only Keeley knew where I was. I felt a jolt of loneliness so deep that it frightened me.

  If I stopped swimming in Roger’s wake,
would it matter? No one cared about me doing this, did they? I felt tired just thinking about how many more swims I had to do to complete my retracing of Roger’s work. I wanted the simplicity and joy from these swims to alleviate my depression, but all I was doing was creating more work for myself. That meant I worried more – that I wasn’t doing this journey properly, that I wasn’t really a swimmer, that this was merely a pale imitation of Roger’s efforts. As I lay my bike down and took in the river and the fields around me, I let these worries, this blossoming self-pity, nuzzle their way down into every part of my being. All this because of grey weather and an unpleasant bike ride. When I say my anxiety is a result of fixating on fleeting emotions, this is what I mean.

  I looked around. Litter dotted the bank. Empty Burger King wrappers and crushed cans of cider were strewn around an old fence post, where someone had carved ‘Back soon 2 tidy up’. I wondered if they’d bothered taking a dip. Further upstream the grass was flattened, otter spraint shat out at a convenient entry point. I decided I would keep my eyes peeled for more telltale signs of the elusive creature as I changed into my shorts.

  Beyond my infuriating concerns about the trip as a whole, I was also worried about slick mud. Roger talked of having to pull himself through sharp reeds and black, tar-like stuff to free himself from the Lark. But as I put my foot over the bank and into the water, I found the bottom to be sandy and quite firm. I waded out a few feet before swimming off. It felt appropriate to slide my head under quickly and give myself a proper baptism. The wide river sits high here but you can’t see over the banks and so I felt as if I was swimming across a vast aqueduct, the huge dome of the Fenland sky so impossibly high I felt I could fly up into it for days and never touch it. The sun was coming out now and it was starting to heat up.

  Once again, pike also dominated my thoughts. I had googled the River Lark the previous evening, the first image I saw being of a champion angler wearing a head torch and clasping a slippery twenty-pound specimen near this very spot. I let my feet fall to the riverbed and search for something to stand on, but there was nothing.

  Immediately I imagined this monster of the deep going for my toes. Two months on from my Bungay dip, when Tim and I had discussed pike dissection strategies, my fears had not been allayed. Perhaps I needed to heed Roger’s advice and remember that pike only ever really attack in little pools where they’ve eaten everything in sight and pinkies are their only option. This was an open river teeming with young wildfowl and small roach: a veritable feast for a giant pike.

  I swam on for a few more minutes, letting the sun warm my back as I kept an eye out for otters. No joy. Instead, I paddled slowly back to the bank and took my time drying off, serenaded by a just-visible reed warbler rustling in the rushes at ankle level. I ate my sandwiches and waved a hearty hello to two people who chugged past on a long barge. They asked after the water temperature – clearly they’d spotted me flailing about, although I hadn’t noticed their approach.

  I set off back towards Ely in far higher spirits, happily reborn, enjoying a brief respite from a mind that never seemed to stopped whirring with worries and pessimistic possibilities. I didn’t realise that this would be my last proper swim for three months. My trip was about to be brought to an unceremonious halt, the need to fight years of anxiety and depression with more than just a swim thrown into sharp focus. The bike that had taken me through London and over the Fens to the Lark was about to lead me down a much more important, unexpected and ultimately more rewarding route.

  * * *

  It was a warm afternoon, so I decided to set aside the article I was working on about expensive headphones and take a ride into town for a swim at the Oasis pool. I’d already marked this central London spot green on my Waterlog spreadsheet, but with my next dip on Roger’s trail over a week away, I fancied a paddle to work off the late summer sweat. I was feeling buoyant, the Lark’s magic still giving me a buzz a couple of days on, keeping the black dogs at bay.

  I settled into a steady rhythm as I cycled past the Oval and on towards Waterloo. It was a route I followed at least once a week into the city and I knew it well: the deep potholes in the bus lanes on Kennington Park Road, the off-kilter phasing on the traffic lights at Lambeth North station.

  It happened there, at the lights, in slow motion. I felt the touch of the Range Rover’s flank on my rear wheel, my bike wobbling dangerously beneath me. I shouted and turned to the driver, his face looming across at me from the passenger seat, contorted in rage.

  We exchanged pleasantries. My hand was raised in a gesture usually reserved for gentlemen trying to put footballers off when taking corner kicks. Anger swelled inside me and I swore loudly, invective pouring from my mouth as the black SUV accelerated fast in front of me, cutting me up before its brake lights glowed scarlet, screeching to a halt across the bike lane, impeding my path.

  I muttered a brief ‘Oh fuck’ and dropped my foot to the ground, my breathing laboured, as if I’d just emerged after jumping into Hampstead pond. I scooted my bike around the car, but the driver was on me in a flash, striding towards me, hurling abuse, fists raised.

  I put my arms across my face, expecting a punch. The shove was unexpected and I dropped my hand to break my fall. I landed in a heap underneath my bike in the middle of the road and looked up at the driver. He loomed over me, stared down and spat a quick ‘fuck off’ as I tried to stand up. I mouthed the registration number repeatedly as he slammed his door and drove off, his tyres squealing in my ears.

  I managed to stand. From the corner of my eye I could see a crowd looking on, but I saddled up and left the scene, mortified.

  The adrenalin rush was incredible. It was every bit as visceral as the one I’d felt jumping from the window at Fladbury. My heart gave a deep thud as I pushed on. I was almost hyperventilating. It was the most intense high imaginable, coupled with the bizarre, disturbing realisation that I’d just been attacked in broad daylight.

  I only noticed the dull throb of my wrist when I squeezed on the front brake. A sharp pain zipped up my forearm. I stopped, called the police to report what had happened, then carried on to the pool regardless.

  I changed quietly and looked at the blue bruise from my fall. It seemed to grow with each length that I swam, the pain increasing every time I touched the wall and turned to push off on another lap. I was adamant that the swim could fix this. My mind worked the situation over and over, faster and faster. With each stroke came a new thought – wilder, more outlandish, more troubling.

  I shouldn’t have sworn at him.

  This was my fault.

  What if he followed me?

  What if he’s waiting for me?

  It can’t be broken. It can’t be broken.

  I swam forty lengths, my mind working at terrifying speed. Swimming hadn’t worked its usual soothing magic. I changed, easing my right arm through my shirtsleeve carefully, gently. The pain was getting worse.

  I unlocked my bike, swung my leg across and set off. There was no other way home. I cycled back slowly, past the spot where I’d been attacked, swerving around the potholes of Kennington Park Road, back to Camberwell. I found a bandage and wrapped up my wrist. I sat down and cried.

  Keeley got home early. I was sitting on the sofa reading, and watched as she pushed her bike through the living room and out into the back garden. I followed her through the flat and asked about her day. Good, she said. Yours?

  It all poured out. The accident, the attempt to swim through the pain, the ride home. I tried to claim my wrist was just a bit sore, but by now I could barely move it. Calmly, she convinced me of the need to get it looked at. We walked to the casualty department close to our house and I returned four hours later with my wrist in a temporary brace and an X-ray confirming what I’d known all along. My wrist was broken.

  A broken wrist isn’t debilitating. You can still sleep in relative comfort and wash yourself each morning. But it is a huge inconvenience if you make a living by typing out hundreds of w
ords every day on a freelance basis. And when your hobby involves swimming to escape the constant worry and guilt that you’re not doing enough work and aren’t living up to the unrealistic expectations of success that you set yourself, it essentially renders you incapable of doing anything.

  This is how it was for the first week after the attack. I felt useless. Not to mention the fact that when I recounted the incident – to the concerned police officers who came by to take a statement, or friends who noticed the brace on my arm – I felt ashamed, as if the whole thing was my fault.

  As I had done while swimming at the Oasis, I allowed myself to extrapolate the situation into needless and unlikely directions. I blamed myself and beat myself up for reacting the way I had done, for failing to apologise for an indiscretion I hadn’t committed, replaying the attack over and over in the futile hope that it would turn out differently, that my wrist would miraculously heal and that I would feel better.

  I sat down at my desk and opened up the long list of Waterlog swims I had left. There were more than thirty, roughly half of what Roger had accomplished in just nine short months. With my brace set to be replaced by a cast, there was no chance I would be able to swim for another two months, maybe three, by which point winter would be nipping at the edges of autumn and I would be facing another year of chasing Roger’s trail, of trying to fix myself and my anxieties using his tried and tested method of a cooling outdoor dip.

 

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