Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  Now ear-infection-free, I do most of my swimming in the sea or rivers or open-air pools, but in winter I do retreat, reluctantly, beneath a roof. I ruled out the public pool closest to my current house in Somerset since it’s very dark and as you navigate the deep end, there is a palpable sense that you might be swimming over a section of abandoned car, its interior now inhabited by a family of mutant three-headed fish and the occasional eel. Instead I drive twenty-five minutes to another, lighter pool, which is decent enough as public pools go, although not devoid of acts of passive aggressive backstroke. Here, in the medium ability lane, I have attempted to work a more dynamic posture into my stroke, getting more intimate with the water, which allows me more speed although conversely gives me a clearer view of the occasional thick clump of black hair as it floats up from the depths into my shoulder. Charlie’s teaching makes swimming the opposite of a vicious circle: you swim with less effort, which stretches your spine and makes you longer and thinner and fitter, which makes you swim with less effort, which stretches out your spine and makes you longer and thinner and fitter.

  You could say I left it all quite late to do this. I’m forty-three. All attempts to feel and look better must now naturally be set against the downhill physical slope that eventually leads to life’s off ramp. I am sometimes tempted to speculate about how different the years between twenty-four and thirty-four might have been for me if I’d exercised more and not shovelled so much rubbish into my body, but that is a moot point since the very fact that I didn’t exercise much between twenty-four and thirty-four and ate and drank a lot of rubbish is an intrinsic part of why I am getting so much pleasure out of doing the opposite now. Besides, I have always had a preference for going about life the difficult way. Long cuts don’t get anywhere near enough credit in this age of the short cut, this age of the spurious ‘life hack’. Life cannot be hacked; not in any meaningful or lasting sense. I’ve worked hard on my swimming. Fifty lengths of a twenty-five-metre pool felt like an achievement at one point. Now, fifty feels like chickening out; seventy or eighty feels more like the mark. There is a point during one of these long swims – usually a little after halfway – where it all becomes much easier, but only after it’s become much harder first. I have noticed that if I look at my fellow swimmers and measure myself against them, my swimming deteriorates. This makes total sense because it’s a microcosm of that bigger lesson that swimming will eventually teach you, about happiness coming from being inside your own space and not trying to control separate ones that are out of your reach.

  Public swimming pools nearly always have a finely nuanced, low-lying drama to them, as if something very important is about to happen but never quite does. Tension appears to build over the hour or so I spend at mine – yet when I emerge from the pool the tension level is somehow the same as it was at the start. The large number of lifeguards no doubt assists in the creation of such an atmosphere. I would be totally fine being a lifeguard if I could read a book on duty, but I am guessing that’s not allowed, and I assume the job must be deeply boring. One day last winter there was a major crisis for the lifeguards at the pool when a large amount of shower gel was spilt on the floor of the men’s showers. More and more lifeguards gathered around the head lifeguard and a plan was strategically formed to defuse the situation. Below the lifeguards, four men in their fifties were ploughing through the water with a fair amount of violence. The men share a friendship – maybe originating in the pool itself, or prior to that, I can’t tell – and I don’t go in the Fast Lane when they are there: not just because I’m nowhere near as fast as them but because the whole lane assumes a different character when they are in it, and I hail from the Medium Lane, which is a whole other continent. Also, one of them – the one with the most calm, commanding aura, whom the others listen to attentively – is a police officer, and for much of last January mud was obscuring my rear registration plate, the treads on my front left tyre were quite low and my bumper had fallen off twice in two days in the same spot just outside Ilchester. When the men swim they do so in a splashy maelstrom that creates a kind of unison, and it is impossible to tell where anyone is. I don’t get the impression they’re people who swim the way that they drive, though, in the way that I do with some of the more aggressive and selfish swimmers at the pool. In their breaks, the men chat about the quality of the water. ‘Is it me or is it a bit more choppy today?’ the large, bald one asked one day.

  My dad formed a gang at his own local public pool in Nottinghamshire and I had long wondered how that could happen, but witnessing these men as they go about their ritual has made me more aware of how the process might work. I’ve never been to my dad’s local swimming pool, but the cast of characters who populate the male changing rooms there for the early swim on weekdays are so familiar to me they seem like old friends. There’s Pat, a retired mining geologist my dad once enlisted to identify an old bit of stone he’d brought to the swimming pool changing room, and Malcolm, whose clothes my dad will often hide while Malcolm is showering. There was also Andrew, who died last year, and who, in the advanced stages of his cancer when he could barely walk, still doggedly swam thirty lengths a day before crawling along the poolside to the changing room. My dad misses Andrew who, late in his illness, once kindly picked a bogey off my dad’s cheek for him. ‘The things I do for my friends!’ Andrew said, as he removed the bogey. More occasional members of the gang include Underpants Sebastian, who, while standing naked in the changing room, likes to wave his Y-fronts about in an attempt to emphasise a strident political point he is making. When I see my dad, he brings each of these men with him in spirit, as they now represent the most eventful part of his social life, which could already be considered surprisingly eventful for a sixty-nine-year-old who professes to dislike pubs and multi-person gatherings.

  When my parents drove down from Nottinghamshire to Devon to visit me in June 2017 I was coming off the back of a sociability overdose and all the invisible swimming men my dad had brought with him became a bit overwhelming. In the month since I’d finished my latest big writing project, six different sets of friends had stayed at my house and, as much as I’d enjoyed all the conversation, my brain was feeling like it had been left for too long under a heated lamp, like scrambled eggs you get at the buffet of a bad hotel. After four weeks of almost constant walking and talking, merely following the structure of a simple anecdote now made me feel like a cat chasing a laser pointer wielded by someone particularly vindictive. What I wanted to do more than anything was sit in a copse on top of a hill and take a week-long vow of silence. Having my parents in the house felt more like having thirteen people staying with me than two, my mum representing one of these and my dad representing the other twelve. I told my dad how tired I was, due to all the people I’d seen recently. ‘THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING SOCIABLE,’ my dad replied. ‘IT WILL STOP YOU GETTING ALZHEIMER’S. THEY’VE PROVED IT.’

  I wished I could have given more attention to my dad’s stories, as I hadn’t seen him for several weeks and there was a lot to catch up on, very little of it not tinged with peril or excitement. ‘DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE HAIRDRESSER’S CAR?’ he asked.

  I searched the now extremely dry scrambled eggs inside my skull. I definitely remembered at least a couple of hairdresser-themed episodes he’d regaled me with recently – something about a double entendre, the multicultural tour of hairdressers he’d been on around Hyson Green in Nottingham where, after hearing how loudly my dad spoke, a young Jamaican girl had made the assumption he must be deaf and taken to repeating all the tour guide’s comments for his benefit – but nothing about a car.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘MY HAIRDRESSER HAS GOT THIS REALLY FLASH SPORTS CAR AND I SAW IT IN THE SUPERMARKET CAR PARK. IT’S WHITE AND IT WAS A BIT DIRTY SO I WENT OVER AND WROTE ‘HAIRCUT’ IN THE DIRT WITH MY FINGER, BECAUSE I NEEDED A HAIRCUT. SHE DIDN’T FIND OUT IT WAS ME UNTIL ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER. SHE’D THOUGHT HER GRANDKIDS HAD DONE IT. SHE GAVE THEM A R
IGHT BOLLOCKING.’

  *

  It rained for most of my mum and dad’s stay at my house which meant that, unusually, my dad spent barely any time outside in my garden with his top off. Sometimes my dad and his swimming-pool friends complain about stuff their wives won’t let them do. One of his friends at the pool had lately complained that his wife won’t let him kiss her goodbye on the front doorstep if there are people in the street and he is wearing his pyjamas. My dad responded by complaining that my mum would not let him walk around with his top off when her friends come over for cake. Last time my mum’s best friend Jane had dropped by my dad had tried to find a loophole in the rules by walking around the garden with his top off but with strips of gaffer tape over each of his nipples.

  The weather improved on the third day of my parents’ stay, which was also the eve of the general election. My dad went out into the garden early and bathed in what little gauzy sunlight there was, moving the deckchair every few minutes to chase the rays with precision. As I cleaned my teeth, I noticed his electric tooth-flosser on the sink. In the late morning, he and my mum went off to the beach to do some rock-pooling. Feeling bad that I hadn’t gone with them, I walked down to the polling station at the village hall, where I voted, voting a bit harder than I had voted at points in the past. I then used my remaining solitary time to enjoy some silence, meditate and read, which is to say I replied to the messages I hadn’t replied to while friends had been visiting, replied to some of the replies to those, got back to some other friends I was due to see in a week or so about exactly where and when I was supposed to see them, got sucked into a couple of online conversations about rare records, quarter-digested four pages of a book, then heard the click of my garden gate and my dad shouting ‘EY?’ at my mum.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ I asked, when he arrived in the living room.

  ‘YEAH. GER OUTSIDE AND HAVE A LOOK WHAT’S ON THE LAWN.’

  My dad is a collector, but not of the conventional kind: you won’t find rare records or complete sets of old maps in his house, but you might well find a dried hedgehog, a comically shaped cucumber or an esoteric piece of metal he has dug up while creating a new flowerbed. It was only about five paces from the middle of my living room to my lawn but in the time it took me to take those I hypothesised several possibilities relating to today’s discovery. Would it be another dried snake, like the one he found a few years ago while walking in Norfolk, then stored in the pocket of his car’s driver-seat visor? A bottle containing an ancient love note from overseas? Or maybe he had brought me a surprise impulse present? Another electric tooth-flosser, to add to the two he had purchased for me in the past, which I had never used? What I saw instead was a long fish, dappled, and of aerodynamic appearance. I’d seen a few dead animals on my lawn since living in Devon, but this was undoubtedly the most exotic.

  ‘IT’S A SMALL-SPOTTED CATSHARK,’ said my dad.

  ‘It absolutely stunk up the car on the way here, but your dad insisted on bringing it back,’ said my mum. ‘We found it on the tideline, near the beach where you like to swim.’

  ‘LOOK AT THAT HOOK IN ITS FACE,’ my dad said. ‘EVIL THING. SOME FOOKIN’ BASTARD SPORTS FISHERMAN’S CAUGHT THAT THEN CHUCKED IT BACK IN WITHOUT TAKING THE HOOK OUT. SPORTS FISHERMEN ARE BASTARDS.’

  I looked more closely at the catshark. The bit of curved steel in its cheek was nightmarish, more so for the miniature neatness of its design. It wasn’t even nightmarish in a spooky way; it was precise and malevolent, gruesomely efficient. I estimated the fish had been dead a couple of days: three days too early to see the apparently foregone result of the general election and a future which would undoubtedly spell even more doom for it and its fellow wildlife on and around the British Isles. A couple of flies crawled out of its mouth, part of which had already rotted away. I marvelled that so recently it had been a factory of life, able to wriggle and twist and bite and digest.

  ‘What are you thinking of doing tomorrow?’ I asked my dad.

  ‘BEING DEPRESSED BECAUSE THE TORIES HAVE WON.’

  Above us, a jackdaw, who’d been sitting on the aptly Gothic chimney pot of my house, took a sudden dive towards my hedge, banking, rolling 360 degrees in the air then accelerating through a tunnel of buddleia; an outrageous move that would no doubt have received all sorts of international awards, had it been performed by a more conventionally attractive bird. I liked my local jackdaws a lot and had an arrangement with them and the local gulls. The arrangement was this: if I put anything edible or half edible out on the lawn, within less than an hour they would remove it. I had come to look at them as fondly as I would two competing sets of handsome bin men – industrious, environmentally scrupulous ones, who eschewed landfills and didn’t mess with your mind by changing their schedule after bank holidays. But over the next couple of days they surprised me: not one so much as picked at the catshark, let alone carted it away. I had taken them for birds who had little care for ‘best before’ dates, but I had been wrong.

  The day after my parents left, the temperature rose dramatically. The garden grew hazy and slow, like steam was being squirted into it from a vast unseen subway vent turned on its side. The gulls and jackdaws mysteriously vanished. Wood pigeons took over, getting randy and acting like drugged fools, ending up upside down in thick conifers looking confused. Holding my nose, I transported the catshark to the wild ground behind my house. St John’s wort and teasels were beginning to run rampant here, where forget-me-nots had been a month earlier. I couldn’t see the tiny predators moving through the heat towards the catshark as I walked away but I could sense them. An hour later, on the clifftop above Not Jenny’s Cove, I stopped to escort a drinker moth caterpillar from the south-west coastal path, fearing for its safety. It showed no outward sign of appreciating my efforts.

  Down in the cove, I swam out alone to the far side, where the water always mysteriously plummets in temperature. I starfished, sustained by the salt, drifting for a while and listening to the noise of industry on the ocean floor. Today it sounded like a significant electrical project taking place beneath me: a high-pitched sound, evoking the image of crabs wielding dental drills. My mind cleared and I closed my eyes and let myself drift. Where would I end up, if I stayed like this? What would the sea decide to do with me? A large body of natural water gangs up on you, without you quite realising it. Waves often look pretty mellow, but when they all get together they’re a forceful cult: they can use their collective belief in themselves to do what they want with you. You have to watch out for rivers too, in a not dissimilar way. A river’s current isn’t always a bodybuilder showing off its pecs; sometimes it’s strong in a calm way, but its power is still there. I have felt it sometimes on mellow evenings when I have swum upstream on the River Dart: the sunlight above me is gentle and sensual and the water seems to be bathing lazily in its touch but there are spots where, doing energetic breaststroke, I find myself barely advancing. It’s like I’m on a flooded treadmill. All it would take is for someone to turn the treadmill up a notch and who knows where I’d end up?

  Over the next ten days I visited the cove – and a couple of others – several times. It was the second summer in succession where doing so had crossed the line separating a hobby from an addiction. Winter had been an interminable, hard-working one for me. I’d waited a long time for summer and wanted to wring every bit of magic I could from it. The previous year I’d taken a few small risks, swam out too far alone. ‘STOP BEING A TWAZZOCK WHEN YOU SWIM,’ my dad told me. I do listen to him, despite what he thinks. Fortunately, the root of my swimming addiction is less about macho box-ticking and more about an intangible alchemy that happens when you combine exercise and drenching your body in something totally natural: water, yes, but the stuff around water, too. Sand, soil, even insects. The tingling, post-orgasmic feeling afterwards. I can neglect pretty much everything else in favour of it, run away from all the things I’m supposed to do as an adult. If my bank manager or the person in charge of my pe
nsion – if I actually had a pension – knew about my swimming habits, they’d be dragging me out of the water by the ear. But I was not feeling hugely interested in my future self. I had once been more interested in him, but that hadn’t worked out all that well for my present self so, instead, right now I was choosing to be interested in sand and salt and wind and rain and sun and being in all of it as much as possible.

  I lean towards sustaining this feeling, even when I am out of the sea. Not Jenny’s Cove is a long walk from the nearest parking area, which is part of the reason why it’s rarely busy. The walk out of the cove is very steep and climbing it after an energetic swim leaves you dizzy and exhilarated at the summit. My friend Hayley calls it Uterus Valley. You walk up from the sand, through a narrow vagina, and into the uterus. For much of 2017 a fallen log resembling a giant desiccated lizard sprawled in the first part of the uterus. By spring 2018, it was, bafflingly, gone. I can only think it was chopped into bits by someone with an electric saw and used for fires on the beach. As I passed the giant wooden lizard on my way back up the uterus in 2017, I was usually barefoot. Back in April, on the first warm day of the year, I’d exploded out my front door barefoot and almost immediately stood on some sharp broken wood, sustaining several splinters. I managed to get three out with tweezers, a couple worked their way out on their own, but the biggest one lodged firmly in a very painful place, on the nerve between two of my toes, and for a fortnight I could barely walk. After three weeks with barely any improvement I visited my doctor, who located the bit of wood and said he could attempt to cut it out, but it might be messy and make walking even harder for a while. I opted to wait. In the end the piece of wood moved to a less painful place, and gradually, I suppose, just rotted away inside me. Long before then, someone had described me as being ‘part tree’. The way I saw it, the splinter just made that part a bit bigger.