by Libby Page
“That’s right, my love,” she says quietly. “We’re going for a swim, sweetheart.”
No one in the changing room seems to mind her talking to herself. Madness seems to be accepted when you are pregnant, she has found, just like mood swings, toilet breaks, and eating two (okay, three) hamburgers a week.
Her bikini bottom sits low on her hips and a moon of flesh pokes out from her tankini. It fit her last week. She balances her towel on her mountain as she puts her clothes into her bag and shuts her locker, taking the towel again and hanging it over her shoulder.
A teenage girl holds the door open for her. The pregnant woman will miss the kindness that seems to radiate around her pregnancy. She smiles and steps out onto the deck and the sun on the lido smiles back at her. Her feet slap softly on the wet concrete. Her ankles are swollen and her toenails are bare: she can’t reach over her stomach to paint them anymore. She feels people watch her walking the length of the pool and she watches them watching her.
She has never had as many conversations with strangers as she has had while pregnant. Pregnancy is like the weather: everyone wants to talk about it. She has been advised to lie on her left side to cure her swollen ankles, she has been shown countless photographs of grandchildren, and strangers have suggested numerous birthing plans to her. In reality she likes the attention. It helps that it is something that is hers and not her husband’s. Not that she would admit it to anyone, but she is terrified that her baby will love its father more than her.
Lowering herself down the ladder is a struggle, but as soon as she is in, the weight that has grown for eight months is gone—the water carries them both. It is a pleasant kind of cold. A cold that soothes a body that is so often hot now with the heaviness of her child.
As she swims she thinks about mundane things, like she must remember to buy cat food and did the recycling bin get collected today and don’t forget to call my mother-in-law and thank her for lunch. Her strokes are slow but strong, the two of them moving through the water like a steadily coasting ship. The sky is spotted with clouds the color of elephant skin and there is a breeze arguing with the trees. As she swims through the shadow of their branches she thinks about their small elbow of garden and whether it will fit a swing. Perhaps he will need to learn to walk beforehand. Or which comes first? Perhaps they could get a baby swing.
She kicks and she feels him kick.
A woman seated on the edge pulling a swimming cap over her child’s head smiles at the pregnant woman. This is what exceptionally beautiful people must feel like, she thinks as she swims.
The pregnant woman’s husband is cooking dinner tonight; in fact, he has been cooking most nights recently. She wonders what she will be eating—she hopes not stir-fry; her body suddenly squirms at the thought of noodles, not that she particularly dislikes them.
When she first told him she was pregnant, they both cried happy tears. That night he wouldn’t stop kissing her stomach. His lips pressed tenderly on her belly button and then between her thighs.
A few weeks later they both cried terrified tears. She can’t even remember what one thing triggered it, but she suddenly felt like a child handed a secret that was much too big for her. At first she felt excited, then she was crushed by it. Her husband must have felt the same because they both cried and trembled and suddenly wished themselves alone with each other again. They only had two oars and just enough strength and experience to keep them both rowing in a straight line. A third person would surely send them off course.
It was he who finally calmed her. He bought the books and made them sit and read them together. She had been avoiding them, worried that the references to breast pumps and how soft babies’ skulls are would overwhelm her. But they sat together and studied like teenagers for exams and it became okay.
In the shallow end she rests for a moment, her back against the side and her hands on the damp fabric stretched across her stomach. She used to hate it when pregnant women stroked their bellies in public like that—it seemed too intimate. But now she can’t help it.
She cannot wait for her baby to be born. Her body aches from carrying and her heart aches from wanting. But as she swims she wishes it could be like this forever—just the two of them, both as close as they will ever be to another person. The water holds them and they hold each other.
CHAPTER 7
Kate didn’t expect that buying a swimsuit would be such a challenge. She stands under the fluorescent glare of the changing room light and examines her body in the mirror. She has always been petite but over the past year she has put on a little weight from living off microwave meals and peanut butter. Looking in the mirror she sees someone she hardly recognizes. Hips: too wide. Thighs: too round and mapped with cellulite. Breasts: still too small.
Kate is not a Naked Person. She gets into the shower quickly and dresses again in the bathroom. Even getting into her pajamas is done in a rush. As a child her house wasn’t one where her parents walked from bedroom to bathroom across the hall in the nude. She was not from a family of Topless Sunbathers or Let-It-All-Hang-Outers. Prudishness flows in her veins.
Her clothes sit in a pile in the corner of the changing room. The jeans hold the shape of her legs. She desperately wants to reach for them but there is one more swimsuit to try on (the fourth). She needs to make a decision.
When Rosemary said she would be interviewed if Kate had a swim, Kate nearly said no. But this was her first proper story and a chance to prove herself to Phil and to start writing the articles that might be truly worthy of her mum’s pride.
And Rosemary’s words have stuck with her: It’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to do it. Because there was a time when Kate had enjoyed swimming. When she was little, before she caught the infection of self-consciousness, she used to go with Erin to the local pool where dolphins and seals were painted on the bottom and a fountain sprayed squealing children. Erin would swim through Kate’s legs underwater and lift her onto her shoulders. She remembers the carefree happiness she felt in the water with her sister. Perhaps if she gets back in the water, she can swim back to that feeling.
Kate confronts her stomach in the mirror. It is soft and a line of dark hair makes a dash from her belly button down into the waistband of her pants. Hair. That had been a terrifying part of growing up. Why did all that hair have to sprout from such unlikely places? Since she was fourteen she has tried shaving and waxing and using hair removal creams that smell of Play-Doh. Nothing quite cuts or pulls or washes away that initial teenage discomfort at discovering all that hair though.
She reaches for the swimsuit currently slumped at her ankles and shimmies it over her hips and up over her breasts. The smell of Lycra clings to her throat and makes her feel like she is drowning before she has even made it to the pool. It is hot in the shop, so hot that she starts to feel a familiar prickle under her arms and a spinning in her head.
It is the Panic. Not now, she thinks, not here. But the Panic is already in the changing room with her, making the space unbearably small. It is all around her, filling up the tiny cubicle, pressing down on her from the outside, and bursting out of her from the inside. It forces her down to the floor until she is kneeling in the swimsuit, her breathing overtaking her in gulps and gasps. There is not enough air. Her lungs will not breathe like she wants them to. She needs water, but a fumble in her handbag tells her that she left her bottle at home. Her lungs heave as she tries desperately to stay afloat. The Panic puts two hands on her temples and squeezes hard.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, she thinks, as the tears descend her cheeks.
One. It’s too hot. Two. Please stop. Three. I can’t. Four. Deep breath. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. After a few minutes she has managed to reclaim control of her breathing. She sits on the changing room floor. The mirror has a crack running through the middle. Just like me, she thinks. She stays crouched on the floor, exhausted.
Kate had her first panic attack in the beauty section of a department store. It was just after s
he arrived in London and started her journalism master’s program. While Kate was growing up, anxiety had always lurked in the background, waiting. She never liked crowds; when other children invited her to parties at theme parks or cinemas, she would pretend to her mum that she had a stomachache and couldn’t go when really she was just knotted with the fear of being among so many people. She preferred sitting quietly with a book. Her mum sometimes found her curled up asleep in the bottom of her wardrobe with a book open on her lap. It’s where she went to read, feeling safe and cocooned in the small space with her mother’s clothes and the smell of her perfume protecting her.
Kate felt more comfortable in her books than she did in real life. She liked to reread her favorite stories: knowing what was going to happen made her feel calm, as though she was directing the story herself. And if she didn’t like the direction a new book was taking, she could simply close the pages, take a break, and return when she felt ready or move on to a different story. But real life wasn’t like that.
When she moved to London she felt like her life was a car driving away and she was being dragged behind, bumping and scraping along the pavement. Everything was new, and big and strange; she felt small and alone.
On the first day of her master’s program, the lecturer went around the class and asked them all to say something about themselves. Kate told them about Bristol, about her family, and that she now lived in Brixton.
“And like a true Bristol woman I love cider.”
Then the other students spoke in turn.
“I’m Josh, and I was the editor in chief of my university newspaper. My investigative series on racism on campus was nominated for a national award.”
“Henrietta here. My comment pieces have been regularly published in the Independent and the Guardian.”
“My name is Lucas and I have a first in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, where I was also head of my students’ union and received the highest grade in my year group.”
And it went on from there. With each new speaker Kate felt smaller. Doubt flooded her body: What was she doing here? She admired them really but she didn’t have the language to talk about herself like that and it made her cringe.
After the lecture she headed to Oxford Street, the first place she thought of to go shopping to buy a present for her mum’s birthday. It was rush hour and she had never seen so many bodies squashed together on the tube. She was taken by the crowd as though she was a piece of driftwood on the sea, pushed along the platform, right to the edge, then forced inside the doors and up against the body of a stranger.
Once she was out at street level, it was no better. People in suits heading home slalomed through crowds of shopping tourists. Kate pushed through to the crossing then made her way slowly down the street. Every few paces she was stopped behind a pram or a group of shoppers. She felt her heart rate rising as people bumped into her or jostled her with their shopping bags. It was the end of September but unusually hot, and she felt herself sweating under a coat that she couldn’t take off because of the crowds pressing around her.
She couldn’t remember deciding to head into the department store. Suddenly she was standing in the fragrance pit with eager sales assistants squirting at her from bottles, aggressive smiles painted perfectly on their faces.
“Can I help you?” a woman in a white uniform like a dental assistant’s said as Kate swayed past her. Kate’s mouth was full of the taste of too many perfumes. The smells were sickly and sweet, like sticky candies that have been left for too long in a coat pocket.
The people around her seemed like a swarm of insects. She was spinning and saw herself reflected a thousand times in the thousand mirrors—on the side of the escalator, on the pillars, on the makeup stands, in the compacts that the sales assistants held up while customers tried on a new shade of lipstick. Even the floor was reflective and showed her terrified face in its shiny black surface.
Everything was hot and heavy, and she had a pain behind her eyes that felt like someone had just ripped open the curtains and sunlight that was too bright to bear was pouring into her head. And then she realized she couldn’t move. She was crouching next to the Estée Lauder stand, terrified. She was crying and her makeup was dripping down her face and staining black circles on her white top.
Kate never thought she was someone who would sit down on the floor in the middle of a department store and cry for no reason that she could possibly express. If she could have escaped her body and looked at herself from a distance, she would have wondered who that crazy woman was and what the hell was wrong with her.
Back in the sports shop Kate dresses again and wipes her face. She smooths her hair, opens the changing room door, and walks to the counter.
“I’ve decided, thank you,” she says, “I’ll take this one.”
You wouldn’t tell from looking at Kate that she is a young woman who is visited by the Panic. Only she knows that.
CHAPTER 8
The lido empties of people when it rains. Rosemary watches it, sheltered from the spring shower by the balcony above. There are only two swimmers in the water. She can’t understand why; swimming in the rain is one of her favorite pleasures. It’s a secret thrill like the extra spoonful of brown sugar in her morning porridge or the feeling of slipping feet into socks that have been warming on the radiator.
When it rains the line between sky and water is blurred. “Above” and “below” fade from black and white to a murky gray where everything is water. The few other swimmers look at one another smugly, like proud new parents who know that their baby is cuter than all the other babies. They know that they have something extra special, and that only they can see quite how special it is.
It was raining a few weeks ago when she first heard that the lido might be closing. She had gone for her usual swim and Geoff had stopped her to tell her. He was a middle-aged man with a face Rosemary thought of as kind. He insisted on wearing a shirt and tie to work, but trainers were his one concession to his surroundings. They were bright red and smiled out beneath the hem of his smart gray trousers.
“Mrs. Peterson, before you go I have something I need to tell you,” he said when he saw her passing the reception desk. That’s when he told her that the lido had been struggling to make ends meet for a long time, and that a property development company—Paradise Living—had made the bid to the council a week ago. He said they wanted to turn it into a residents-only gym—another thing to help them sell the flats they were building across Brixton.
“And I didn’t know if I should tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve heard they are even talking about cementing over the pool and building a tennis court on top. Apparently they think tennis is more popular with their tenants.”
He said that it wasn’t certain, but that it was looking likely.
“I’m so sorry,” Rosemary said. “Your lovely children.”
Geoff had pictures of his children, a boy and a girl of eight and ten, stuck to a noticeboard behind the reception desk. They swam there every weekend, often running to hug him straight out of the pool and getting the legs of his trousers soaking wet. He never seemed to mind.
“Will the council find you other work?”
“I am hopeful,” said Geoff. But he didn’t sound like his hopeful self.
As Rosemary swam that day she tried to shut out the images of her lido filled with cement and closed forever to the public. It was only when she got home that she let herself cry.
A few days later, she had made the leaflets at a nearby library. She placed photos from her album on the photocopier beneath the paper where she had written her message. She had to wait quite a long time for the hundred copies to come out. As she sat she read all the flyers that were on display—adverts for events at the local cinema, yoga classes, and a very informative pamphlet on sexual health. Once the copies were finished the stack of paper was as hot as freshly ironed cotton. It strangely smelled like it too.
She decided to leave a c
ouple in the library. That was the start of her scattering flyers like breadcrumbs tracing a route around the lido. She pushed them through the doors of the houses on her street and left a pile in the pool’s café and in the changing rooms. The men looked a little surprised when they saw her sticking flyers to their mirrors.
“I’m eighty-six, don’t you think I’ve seen all of that before?” was all she said, with a vague hand gesture.
Rosemary rises from her seat on the balcony and moves back inside, keeping the door open so she can hear the rain. She heads to the kitchen and takes down a black notebook from the top of the microwave, flicking through pages of handwritten notes until she finds the recipe she is looking for. Her hand rests on the page for a moment, tracing the curve of the familiar writing with her fingertips. Then she takes her paper bags from the market out of the fridge and starts cooking George’s famous vegetable pie. As she cooks she takes a memory from the back of her mind and plays it over in her head like a well-loved record. The smell of cooking fills the flat and Rosemary remembers the day she first met George.
The whole city was celebrating, joining the rest of Europe in a party that spanned streets and borders. On the street where Rosemary and her family lived, the mothers assembled a long table that went right down to the junction at the other end. Bunting hung from trees and Union Jacks were flung from windows. Families stood on either side, throwing tablecloths over to be caught by their neighbors and pulled tightly over the table. The mothers wore their curtain scrap tea dresses and cheerful sweaters made from the spare wool of their children’s old ones, and today they wore them with pride. They had made do and mended, and it had got them through.
The doors were open and food came out of houses like suitcases out of hotels. The crockery was mismatched: blue and white plates from number twelve, dainty rose-patterned from number fourteen, and glasses collected from every cupboard along the street. Jugs held scruffy bunches of flowers picked from the park.