‘To the changing room, hold that smile to the changing room …’ Madame would call, and Moira would smile and smile her blank glassy beautiful smile until she got to the changing room and turned into an ordinary, slightly flat-footed sixth former again. She was a bit plump when she wasn’t in the water, in her outdoor clothes she looked like any other lacklustre schoolgirl. But with her makeup covering her slightly speckled skin, and her hair gelled into a waterproof helmet, and her nose pinched tight by her nose clip, she was a beautiful girl. ‘An artiste,’ Madame said. ‘I will make you an artiste.’
Her solo was to ‘Endless Love’; it was just beautiful. It was very slow – and that’s one of the hardest things to do. She had to hold her positions for ages. But the music was so thick and loud it was like soup, like creamy soup. When you listened and you saw Moira go into her first arabesque it was as if the music went in through your ears, and the point of her extended toe went in through your eyes, and they joined together in your brain, and you could see and hear and think of nothing else.
Moira always did her solo last of all, after warm-up and stamina work, and the team dances. All us Ducklings would ask our mums if we could stay until Moira had finished. I liked to stay until she came out of the water (smiling, smiling all the way to the changing room) so I could hand her towel to her, and see her face, still pinched sharp by her nose clip, turn towards me for one brief dismissive moment. ‘Thank you,’ she would say, and then I would go home with my mum, and my dad would say, ‘Good swim?’ and I would say, ‘Wonderful.’ But I knew he would never understand, and I would never explain.
We were working towards the Nationals in July, and Madame was more and more demanding at every swimming session from May onwards. She got really cross with the Cygnets for mucking about in the changing rooms. She shouted at them and even said things in French. One of the mums was upset, but the others knew it was just Madame’s way before a big event. She had all the worry of it. And with Moira going for the National Solo title this year, well, everyone knew how serious it was. The Swans team were really nasty to the Cygnets when they came in to change and found water all over the floor. They called them stupid kids and complete pains. Us Ducklings just kept out of the way.
Then in June, at the first training session of the month, there was a dreadful notice pinned on the pool door, and the door was shut. Madame was ill, and there was no training, even though it was Monday, and the competition only a month away. She had fallen and broken her hip and gone to hospital. All the mums stood around outside the door, and the Swans and the Cygnets and us Ducklings peered through the double glass doors trying to see the pool. It was awful being shut out, it was awful having to go home without having swum, and awful to see Moira only in her boring white aertex shirt and navy blue skirt looking plain and dull, turning around and biking home, just like anybody.
But during the week the club found a new trainer. A man trainer. ‘That’ll shake ’em up,’ Dad said. I didn’t know that men knew anything about synchronised swimming. I thought it was all women, except for the judges. There weren’t any boy swimmers, and the dads only came to competition nights. I didn’t know that men knew how to do it.
He was nice. He said, ‘Call me Steve,’ which seemed very odd. He knew different warm-up exercises and they were good fun, and he didn’t do stamina exercises at all, he threw weights down to the bottom of the pool and made us fetch them, and threw floating hoops in and we had to swim through them. It was really good fun, like playing. I wondered what Madame would say about people splashing and laughing in training. Some of the youngest Ducklings got really silly and over-excited, and had to be ducked to make them shut up.
He watched the routines and he liked the Ducklings, he even laughed at the little duck dance, which I didn’t like because synchronised swimming ought to be serious. But when he came to the Swans he shook his head.
‘This is something like ten years out of date,’ he said.
Then he saw Moira’s solo and I could tell that he didn’t like it either. That was when I knew that I didn’t like him. He didn’t say anything but he called us altogether at the poolside. Us Ducklings were dressed and ready to go home. The Cygnets and the Swans had their towels around them. I gave Moira her towel and for once she didn’t say thank you. She just took it. She was looking at him, at Steve.
‘You’re a great team,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have come to train you if I hadn’t known that. You’re a great team. Stamina good, lines excellent, formation excellent. What I want us to work on between now and the competition is making you a bit more up to date.’
He said that synchronised swimming was making a bid, a big bid, to be taken seriously as a sport. That it was an Olympic sporting event and it must stay in the Olympics. That people thought it was a load of silly girls with sequins and that it was our job to show them that it was a major strand of athletics and swimming. When he said that, about sequins, I looked at Moira. She had three beautiful costumes and she was making a new one for the Nationals in July. I knew that it would be covered with sequins, and Madame had shown her how to put them on her hairband too, so she had sequins in her hair.
One of the girls had some waterproof glue so that you could stick sequins on your eyebrows. I couldn’t imagine that Moira could win without her sequins, I even thought she might sink without them.
‘So I’ve got some new music, and a new design,’ Steve said. ‘Moira and the Swans, stay behind and I’ll play it to you. Cygnets and Ducklings, see you next week. You’ve done very well. I’m very pleased with you.’
That night, Dad said, ‘Good swim?’ and I said, ‘All right.’ But I did not feel all right. I felt that things were going wrong.
Next Monday we all stayed behind to watch Moira’s new solo. The music was ‘Pumping Iron’ and she started it in the water, so you didn’t really get to see the costume, or her dive in. It just looked like the stamina exercises to me, over and over again. Lots of underwater work, and lots of high jumps. It was really hard, we could tell that. When she came out she was panting, I’d never seen her like that before. She couldn’t catch her breath to smile at all, never mind smile smile smile all the way to the changing rooms.
‘That’s great,’ Steve said. ‘You’ve worked really hard. No-one expects you to look as if you’ve just been for a stroll. Keep those feet moving, keep breathing, excellent.’
I held out her towel for her, and I saw her face. Her face was scarlet with the effort of the new routine. She did not look serene and beautiful, she looked exhausted. She pulled off the nose clip and her nose was an angry red, her eyes were watery from the chlorine.
‘It’s not “Come Dancing” any more,’ he said. ‘It’s not pretty-pretty waving your arms around. It’s not cutaway swimsuits and showing your legs to the judges like underwater Tiller girls. It’s a sport. It’s about discipline, and stamina, and ability. Just like the long jump or the parallel bars, or a freestyle race. You can do it. You can all do it. And we’ll win at the National Championships, I guarantee it.’
He took the tape out of the machine and passed it to Moira. ‘Train at home to it,’ he said. ‘Get that beat and get moving to it.’
She wiped her hand on the towel and took it from him, reluctantly, as if she did not really want it. ‘It’s loud and hard and happening,’ he said. ‘The Mantovani sound is yesterday’s swimming, Moira. I promise you.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
The next three weeks we worked harder than we had ever worked for Madame. He choreographed the Swans dance again, and they were swimming to a rap number now. He wanted us all in regulation black Speedo swimsuits. ‘This is sports,’ he said. ‘Not a fashion parade.’ Some of the Ducklings were quite tearful in the changing room.
We had been promised a white costume with silver sequins, and little white net wings on the shoulder straps. The Swans were sulky and changed in silence. Some of them liked the new dance but none of them liked the costume. They had been goin
g to wear their blue – very high-cut at the leg and with a swathe of green and blue sequins from hip to shoulder. ‘Too 1950s,’ Steve said, and it made it worse that no-one knew what he meant.
The Nationals were held at Filton Pool, Bristol. The teams went all together on the coach and the mums and dads came on later, by car. I was really nervous but when I heard the ‘Three Little Fishes’ song I sort of floated away and did the whole dance and swim in a dream. Everyone clapped a lot, and then we got fifth place which was brilliant because the Ducklings had never been placed before. The Cygnets got tenth place, which everyone said was unfair, and happened only because one of the judges preferred the Plymouth team, and she had been coaching there in the spring. So it wasn’t fair at all.
Then it was the Swans with their team event, and they took fourth place and we all screamed ‘Yessss!’ and clapped and clapped. The pair swim went all wrong, and weren’t placed, and then it was the solo.
I saw at once that Steve was right. The solo pieces were all very athletic and energetic. They splashed like mad – and we had always been taught never to splash. They spent ages underwater and they did a lot of leaps. It was not like Madame’s style at all. It was not like Moira.
I didn’t think she could swim like that, not even with the ‘Pumping Iron’ music and the new choreography. Not well enough to be placed anyway.
When they called her I was looking at the spectator gallery, and I didn’t see her come out of the changing room. By the time I saw her she was at the poolside, and I gasped. She wasn’t wearing what she had been given and she didn’t look how she was supposed to look at all.
She should have been in a neat black costume with a black rubber cap, her face scrubbed bare of makeup, and her fingernails pale. But she was not. She looked like a mermaid escaped from a dream aquarium. Her costume was a shimmering hail of sequins, in deep iridescent blue. It was cut high up to her hips and low at the front to show a fleshy substantial cleavage painted a smooth uniform pink. Her hair was gelled into a perfectly solid mass of a French pleat surrounded by curls like the twirls on a cast-iron gate. Each hairgrip skewering each lock into place was studded with a sparkly flower made of sequins and glitter. She had got hold of the waterproof glue and her eyebrows were made from overlapping green and blue sequins, her eyeliner was a thick line of pure silver. Her thick waterproof makeup made her face, her neck, her shoulders, even her arms, a solid pleasing pink. Her lips – first outlined firmly in pencil, painted with lipstick, and shiny from the final coat of lip-gloss – were an uncompromising fuschia. Her eyes either side of the sharp pinched nose were deep wells of matte blue eye shadow from the socket to the lid. Her eyelashes were monstrous extravagances, superbly long, superbly thick, superbly black.
Steve lunged for her but he was too late. Her music, her real music, boomed out over the loudspeakers: ‘Endless Love’. She posed by the ringside, like a statue of a perfect goddess, and then dived her beautiful straight-legged deep dive, like a blue gannet, straight into the water.
She did her dance, Madame’s dance, flawlessly. She extended her hands, with deep shiny blue nails, high into the air. She upended and pointed her scissoring red-painted toes to the sky. She re-emerged smiling her serene smile, while her legs churned under the water, keeping her steady, keeping her in place. She soared up into her leap, clasped her hands above her head and sank like an arrow under the water, emerged, turned, somersaulted, and the painted smile never even wavered.
The dance finished. Holding her smile, she swam slowly to the steps. There was a smatter of tentative applause and then as she rose from the water she heard the long condemning silence, echoey as a cathedral in the tall silent swimming pool. The judges bent their heads and whispered among themselves, Steve turned his back to her, he would not look at her. She knew, she must have known, that she was disgraced, completely and utterly; and she would never swim for the Siddleset Swans ever again.
But I knew, when I saw her rise from the greeny water of the pool, not a hair out of place, not a sequin disturbed, that I had seen a model of womanhood at the moment of extinction. Like an exquisite dinosaur she stood, her smile as serene as if she were being offered the homage that was unquestionably her due, ignoring the furious rejection of Steve, ignoring the black looks of the judges, ignoring the uneasy ominous silence of the crowd, the shrinking of her friends. Her eyelids, heavily freighted by the waterlogged weight of the massive false eyelashes, loaded with eye-shadow, eyeliner and waterproof mascara on the top, gazed blindly out over the water, as if she were dreaming of a world where she would be accepted – even applauded – for such a triumph of Art over Nature. Where people understood that womanhood, perfect womanhood, must be arduously constructed.
She turned and looked for her towel, still smiling; her huge painted eyes filled with chlorine and tears. Whatever the result, whatever insulting score they levelled at her, she would smile, smile all the way to the changing room, and I knew that whatever I became in the future, when I was no longer a Siddleset Cygnet, nor even a Siddleset Swan, that I had seen tonight an image of womanhood which I would revere in my heart. I would cherish this picture of her – forever.
I stepped forward and gave her the towel, and I felt myself bob in the little curtsey which Madame had taught us, the curtsey for use when presenting a bouquet of flowers to minor royalty.
‘Thank you,’ Moira said graciously, without looking at me. She was still smiling.
The Bimbo
The men in the office all went bananas when Bambi arrived. It was absurd, but that was her name. She was our new temp: Bambi Summers. I called her into my office and she came in smoothing down her skirt all the way over her knickers – no further. There were yards of thigh on view.
I didn’t mind. I’m at a level of success in my life – a partnership in the law firm, a solid relationship with my colleague Philip, an established life of my own. A pretty blonde with huge blue eyes and legs which go on forever doesn’t frighten me. Irritates: yes. Frightens: no.
‘What’s your proper name?’ I asked. ‘Your real name? I can’t call you Bambi. This is a legal firm and you will be working as my clerk. We don’t use pet-names.’
‘My real name is Bambi,’ she said. ‘My mum loves the film. She wanted to call my brother Thumper but the register wouldn’t let her.’
‘Registrar,’ I said.
‘Thumper,’ she said.
There was a short pause.
‘Don’t you have another name, a proper name?’
‘No,’ she said. She looked rather hurt. ‘Won’t you please call me Bambi, Miss Cook? Everyone does.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But you must tell the clients that your name is Miss Summers.’
She nodded obediently and I felt ungracious.
‘And what do I call you?’ she asked.
‘You call me Miss Cook.’
I had expected that she would be incompetent, and I was ready to send her back to the temp company with an acid request that they supply someone more suitable for an old established legal firm; but she was an ideal typist. She worked at remarkable speed and she never made a single mistake. She kept a dictionary on her desk and if she didn’t know a word, she looked it up. There were many words she didn’t know, but she learned them fast. It was only her speech which was sloppy and her dress which was outrageous. Her work was immaculate.
If she had been any less thorough I would have sacked her. The last thing I needed was all the senior partners popping their heads around the door of the clerks’ office and saying ‘Hello Bambi’ in artificial high voices as if they were cooing to a baby.
Philip was as bad as any of them. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed; but he called in to her office first thing every morning to pick up his post and stayed longer and longer every day. I have perfectly good legs myself but the criminal court is hardly the place for them. I wear long skirts and thick tights at work. Beside my dull blackbird appearance Bambi was a budgie, a little songbird, a pet.
And they petted her; all the men in the office did. They teased her and made funny telephone calls to her pretending to be clients and confessing to murder and bigamy. She was fooled every time – she didn’t just pretend to be naive to egg them on. She would come scuttering into my office on her kitten heels and say: ‘Miss Cook! Miss Cook! There’s a man on the phone who says he’s a monogamist! Should I call the police?’
When I told her it was one of the partners teasing her she would collapse into giggles and go and look up monogamist in her dictionary. I would hear her whoop of laughter as she finally got the joke five minutes late.
When the senior partners went out for lunch they would bring back the chocolate mints from their coffee saucers, and she would thank them as if they had given her a box of Belgian chocolates. One of them, I think it may have been Philip, put a plant in her office: a heady sweet-smelling white gardenia.
It grew warmer and then the trees outside the office in the square became lush and green. Bambi’s skirts could not go any shorter; but she wore little crop tops which skimmed the brow of her navel and stretched and moved interestingly as she walked. Her flat stomach was light brown, her arms were the colour of well-made toast, downy with fair hair. She was a caramel cream toasting in the sunshine. Every lunchtime she took a can of a fizzy drink and a sandwich and lay in the full sun in the gardens of the square, and Philip, coming back from court, would sit beside her, still wearing his black gown, and pick blades of grass, and talk to her.
I had a case to defend in the Midlands and I was away for the week. When I came back, tired and travel-worn, pale from the long days in court, Philip had written me a letter and Bambi had a large white diamond on her hand.
She put her head around my door with her apologetic little-girl expression. ‘I hope you’re not mad at me,’ she said.
Bread and Chocolate Page 12