The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Not to our knowledge, no. But it’s been an unusual summer. She’s made new friends. She idolizes Georgia and Josh and Eve.’

  ‘That’s another thing. Why would they be so reckless?’ Ed says. ‘They’ve been on lifesaving courses, spent their lives in pools – they know the risks better than anyone.’

  ‘I’m guessing they thought they were immortal, that nothing bad could ever happen to them. Oh!’ My heart-beat accelerates. TopSpotter … MyLifeInYourHands … Georgia and Josh and Eve … ‘Eve wasn’t there last night. She must have been going to time them but she was ill so Molly took her place. That must be what the spotter is. Let me just check something …’

  Molly’s screen displays a warning about the battery being about to run out. Dismissing this, I tap it on the clock icon at the top, sensing what I’ll see next before I even see it: huge changing numbers, the stopwatch still ticking: 13:03.19 … 13.03:20 … 13:03.21 … She’d hit ‘Start’ just over thirteen hours ago at about 10.30 p.m. When I was in the hut with the Channings, when Ed was sticking candles into my birthday cake.

  ‘Do you know what I think? I think she was by the pool doing this spotter role, but her friends being under water for so long made her panic. Maybe she saw that Georgia was in trouble, or thought she was, though of course she couldn’t see much because of the lights. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Only a dire emergency like that could give her the courage to go in and help. Some instinct overrode the fear. Georgia wasn’t rescuing Molly, Ed. Molly was rescuing Georgia. Or thought she was.’

  We stare at each other in horror.

  ‘Wouldn’t she have been better to call for help?’ Ed says. ‘There were a hundred adults just shouting distance away. A hundred people who knew how to swim.’

  ‘She might have been sworn to secrecy. And you don’t go to authority figures when you’re already in the middle of a criminal act.’

  ‘Josh did.’

  ‘He’s older, more confident. And by then it was an out-and-out emergency, whereas she had just shut off the power, was terrified, not sure she could trust her instinct. This feels right, Ed.’

  And it does: our daughter trespassed in a prohibited area of a closed building, turned off the lights to the entire complex and then, confused by the activity taking place, blundered into the water to try to help her friends, dragging the strong swimmers under.

  ‘Nat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If this is right, she could be in trouble with the police. The CCTV evidence will count against her.’

  ‘No,’ I protest. ‘She’s only thirteen. They’re fifteen and almost sixteen. There’ll be evidence somewhere in this phone that she was influenced. And there’s her phobia. She can’t think rationally around water. That’s well documented.’

  ‘It’s not how the Channings will see it,’ Ed says bleakly. ‘They’ll twist it. Whatever it is, they’ll twist it. This is a nightmare.’

  ‘It’s just a theory,’ I tell him. ‘It may not be right. And the police may not get there themselves.’ Already it feels as if we’re conspiring to pervert the cause of justice. The cause of the Channings.

  At the sound of doors swinging open and shut, we abort our discussion and listen. This time the footsteps are approaching and we stand together a split second before the doors are pushed open. A member of staff comes through: male, late forties, dressed in green scrubs. No clipboard, no notes, no smile. When he steps towards us, there is nothing in that step to tell me what he will say.

  But I know it is terrible news because my whole body prickles, a corrosive, almost dissolving feeling, as if I’m being eaten alive.

  I reach for Ed’s hand, but he is no longer in range, has moved forward independently. Then he glances, sees my hand outstretched, palm open, and he does not take it. And I think then, I’ve lost both of them. I’ve lost everything.

  I’ve lost everything and I’ve got no one else to blame but myself.

  Not even the Channings.

  42

  2016 – one year later

  You could say it was a perfect storm of elements, what happened last summer: Molly’s bid for independence and the sudden breaking of her deadlock with a serious lifelong affliction; the release of tension from my having successfully completed my first year at straitlaced Elm Hill Prep and the excitement of being back in the wild for the summer; Ed being preoccupied at a time of year when I usually counted on him as my daily companion (and, let’s face it, moral guide); seeing Mel again; the August heatwave with its rising temperatures, its air heavy with temptation.

  And the reopening of the lido. That, mostly, because its impact was utterly profound. It was not so much an opening as an arrival, a landing – as if it materialized one day fully formed, an oasis in the suburban deserts, a watery paradise complete with its own deity.

  You know, I looked up water goddesses once, read all about Thalassa, the woman who rose from the depths, and Neptune’s queen Salacia, with her crown of seaweed, and Ran, the Norse sea goddess of love, who collected the drowned in a net.

  Of course the ones we know best are Hydra, Medusa, the Sirens: villains of the water all.

  The first thing I’m going to tell you is that Georgia is alive. She is both a survivor and a hero. She was unconscious for almost twenty-four hours, but they fished her from her oblivion and the neurological damage was both minimal and treatable.

  Her memory of the incident is incomplete, but she knows she was in the pool to compete with Josh in a breath-holding contest and she admits she recruited Molly to turn off the underwater lights so they might avoid discovery. It was a high-spirited lark agreed after the event to have been woefully misconceived. But when Molly toppled in after her, she tried valiantly to save the life of a non-swimmer – a non-swimmer whose parents should have been supervising her more closely, frankly, not pouring cocktails down their throats and fussing about candles on cakes. Not arguing, as they were seen publicly to be doing earlier in the evening. My suggestion – or can I admit it was a hope? – that it might have been Molly who was saving Georgia has been forgotten, if it was ever circulated in the first place. But that’s OK. That’s what expensive PR buys you and no matter what the rest of the world believes, I know what I think.

  The Channings have moved out of La Madrague. They couldn’t continue to live a stone’s throw from the place their daughter almost lost her life.

  Gayle told me the house has been bought by a family from north London. She and the mother got chatting in the lido café and somehow Gayle found herself being talked into doing some tutoring for the older son, who’s going for the eleven-plus to get in to a grammar school just down the train line (like Gayle, the family doesn’t believe in private education).

  I haven’t seen Lara again, not in the flesh. I see her sometimes on TV and my hair stands on end before my brain has even processed the visual evidence of her. It must be her voice: its smoky, intimate cadence is in me for ever now. She’s been hired as a consultant to the Department of Health – or is it the World Health Organisation? Anyway, she’s spoken across the media about her family’s scare and the campaigning it has inspired. She was on Newsnight a few months ago when it was in the news that a nine-year-old boy in Surrey had drowned at a birthday pool party after dropping his mobile phone into the water and going in after it. She is a natural spokeswoman, an excellent advocate for safe swimming. In one speech, she revealed that she had been offered a modelling contract with a leading swimwear brand and had decided to accept the work only after making it clear her fee would be donated to the STA, the world’s largest independent swimming teaching and lifesaving organisation.

  Mermaid on Mulberry Street has been salvaged from the ocean bed and released on Netflix.

  In interviews, Lara is always careful to respect her daughter’s privacy. Georgia was the inspiration for her activism, that she freely concedes, but the last thing she wishes to do is exploit her in any way or cause a setback to her recovery. Occasionally, though, a photo will b
e released on social media or she’ll let slip a snippet about the teen heroine. Like how she’s doing her GCSEs a year late and hopes to follow up with A levels and then drama school. Or how she’s been back in the water, yes, but will never be as confident as she once was. Make no mistake, Georgia is as passionate as Lara about letting young people know that breath-holding games can end in tragedy. Senseless tragedy, Lara calls it, stressing that however strong you are, the water will always win.

  She never says that when Heaven falls that’s how she’d like to meet her maker.

  Georgia is still in touch with Josh and Eve. I discovered that, as I did many of the other details, on the one occasion after the accident that I met Angie. Before she was made aware that she had to pick sides.

  Josh’s recovery was immediate. The first out of the water, he was the one who called for help when he came up for air and could find neither Molly nor Georgia poolside. He’d felt a strong current under water, he reported, which must have been Molly falling in. It’s thought she collided with Georgia, her voluminous clothing weighing both girls down and trapping them, possibly with the added hazard of a tangled balloon ribbon. Josh estimates that almost two minutes had already passed before this happened and the state of relaxation he’d settled into under water made him slow to grasp the situation and lose precious seconds before raising the alarm. He feels guilty about that; he feels personally responsible for what happened to his friends.

  Angie was appalled to learn from Josh that he and Georgia sometimes engaged in hyperventilation to remove carbon dioxide from their blood. They knew enough about the risks of this to use a spotter, a trusted teammate who timed their submersions and checked closely for suspicious immobility. Eve was their preferred and practised spotter. Why they thought to recruit an aquaphobic child in her absence remains unexplained. Maybe they felt sorry for Molly or were acting on pressure from Lara to include her; maybe Georgia had been asked to keep her distracted at the party and this was simply the killing of two birds with one stone. Maybe Molly had begged to be given a role, a chance to belong. I’m as certain as I can be that Georgia befriended Molly in the first place at Lara’s command, that mother involved daughter in her scheming, but a part of me also still believes that Lara liked Molly. She genuinely wanted her to experience the joy of the water. She thought, perhaps, that she didn’t deserve a mother like me. A sadist.

  The Channings never pursued their threat to report Ed to the police and I never told him about it, or about what had happened in the hut that night. I try to convince myself that my secrecy is to spare him the anguish of what might have been, but it doesn’t work. I know the true reason:

  I’m too ashamed.

  Though Miles never joins Lara at her media appearances, there is no evidence to suggest that they have parted ways. If they have, Wikipedia has not yet caught up.

  As for what I did to him in Stoneborough, so carelessly, and yet with so long-lasting an effect, I know now that it was the worst kind of bullying. Given the chance, he might have preferred the brief, containable scare of having his head held under water, like poor Nessie. Being stripped against your will, being forced to appear naked in public, it’s one of the most humiliating and traumatic episodes anyone can suffer, and this was a pubescent child with a developing body and a mind at its most formative. It is a staple of anxiety dreams even for those who’ve never suffered the daylight reality of it. Hence my own recurrent dream, the one where I’m running naked through Elm Hill. It’s so real that I wake up with the chill of the night air on my skin even as my face burns and my heart pounds. I check my feet for blood. I wonder if there is a cardigan in my wardrobe that isn’t mine or a woman called Beverley living on the other side of the high street on Broadwood Road.

  For those, like Miles, who have had the misfortune actually to suffer it, it is almost without exception cited throughout their lives as the most damaging, the most demeaning of all childhood bullying. It is never forgotten. I read a case study of a successful figure in the corporate world who’d sought treatment for drug abuse and had had his troubles traced to a boyhood trauma involving being stripped and humiliated by bullies. You can grow up successful, but you will not feel successful. You may need prescription drugs or the self-medication of alcohol. You may harbour desires for revenge and you may even act on those desires in the hope of laying your ghosts to rest.

  But whatever you do, you cannot undo it. It never disappears. You’ll always be that child mocked as a savage by the civilized world.

  Inside your head, the laughter will never fade.

  Before I forget: not so long ago, I saw Stephen on the high street. He was at a table on the Vineyard terrace, drinking with another couple of guys. ‘All right,’ he called to me, and that was all. Not short but not effusive, just a standard level of interest for a standard neighbourly greeting. That weirdness between us had been no more than casual opportunistic bullying by an unpleasant man. A bored one. He’d found it amusing to watch me squirm. And, presumably unwittingly, he’d been a diversion from his friend’s darker and more systematic agenda.

  A red herring.

  You are probably wondering about Molly. About what the doctor told us when he came through those doors that bank-holiday Monday morning in late August, when Ed hated me almost as much as Miles did. When everyone hated me.

  She was suffering from what is known as dry drowning, which means she’d inhaled enough fluid to cause pulmonary oedema, the extrusion of liquid into the lungs, which reduced her ability to exchange air. Apparently this can take place up to seventy-two hours after submersion.

  If Ed had not called for help when he did, she would almost certainly have drowned in her own body fluid within the next twelve hours.

  If the consultant in respiratory paediatrics hadn’t been on site, having been called to attend to Georgia late the previous night, the care might have been neither as prompt nor as excellent as it was. In the end, the two families were linked by the team that saved their daughters.

  Molly still has the emphysema-like symptoms associated with recovery, will likely have them for the rest of her life, but she is alive and – as far as we know to date – her brain has suffered no damage. She continues to attend the same school and has an exemption from all excursions and activities involving water.

  We remain in our flat in Elm Hill and Ed and I are still together. It’s a different together from before last summer, but at least it’s a different together from the one during it. We no longer consort with glamorous people. I hear the occasional story of superior lives from Gayle, but I do not wish to sample them for myself. I prefer old friends. Sarah is walking well again and we have a standing date to take Inky down to the Kent borders for a woodland ramble.

  With her encouragement, I’m visiting Stoneborough more regularly. I may not think I would choose my mother in a fantasy-parents game, but I know where I am with her. She will not surprise me and I can safely say I love that about her. Since my grandmother passed away in January, Mum has been especially close to Molly. They have a bond all their own and it’s a good, healthy one.

  Ed and I are still not home owners and most of our savings have been used to pay for private medical services for Molly. But we are husband and wife, parents, constants, and that is enough for us.

  Neither of us was able to start work when the new school year began last September. Ed’s job at All Saints was held open for him, but mine was too new for me to have earned that sort of privilege so I made the decision to resign. I am a supply teacher now; I go where I’m asked, for the most part where nobody knows me and my story. I try not to have favourites in my class, try not to notice the more charming parents.

  Other than poor Matt, the lido staff were cleared of any suspicions of wrongdoing on the night of the accident, and the place opened its doors again just a few days later. Of course, by then, the neighbourhood children were back at school, the term-time routines under way, and attendance fell sharply. It was growing cold, starting to cre
ep into autumn.

  For eleven months I avoided returning there. Then, just a few weeks ago on a sticky August day, I faced my fear and went for a swim with Gayle. Can you believe that it was almost as if nothing had changed? We crammed ourselves into a postage-stamp-sized square of unoccupied stone, struggled to manage a length without ploughing into a gaggle of shrieking kids, queued for an age at the kiosk for soft drinks. Even some of the lifeguards were the same.

  For most of the outing I consciously avoided looking directly at the café deck, but just as we were leaving I succumbed. And I admit I did a double-take when I saw our table because a glamorous blonde was sitting there, her mouth wide with laughter, her arms flung in the air as she entertained her friends. Maybe she was even singing along to the eighties song playing on the PA system.

  Of course, on second glance I saw that her looks were quite crude. She was too young to remember the song. I guessed she was simply one of those very effusive types who can only get the attention they crave by acting crazy.

  She was no Lara.

  Epilogue

  Molly Steele, 2016

  This is private. If you are reading this without my permission, then you will be cursed. Which means you will definitely be cursed because you totally do not have my permission. No one does and no one will, ever. So stop reading before your eyeballs start to burn and you turn blind!

  I fantasize sometimes that I’m being interviewed, not by the police but by a reporter or maybe someone researching a book about me. Or I imagine I’m watching an actress playing me in a film and this is the scene where she’s explaining everything that happened. It’s all in the distant past now and my name has been changed, no one knows it’s me, which is why I’m free to tell the truth.

  You know, the truth is not one single thing, I’ve learned that much. It changes, even within your own mind. Even now I’m not totally sure what I was hoping would happen that night at the lido.