by Jonathan Lee
The kid in front of him had loosely knitted limbs, that slouchy bellboy way of making youth seem like a secret, and when he reached the end of the platform he pulled a pair of red goggles over his mop of dark hair and turned and said, “Do you think my watch will make it? This says, like, ten metres resistant.”
“Should be OK.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
As Red Goggles retied the cords of his shorts Moose inevitably gave in to the impulse to look down. He was surprised to find himself beginning to reel—arms out for balance, take a breath. With slow caution he glanced again. A number of coloured floats and armbands down there now. The landlord of the Cricketers flirting with a hefty lady. Freya standing on the tiled lip of the pool, arms crossed. This was a place of echoes and the achievement of private targets. If someone’s foot touched your foot, they apologised profusely.
It was supposed to be only two at a time up here but with Red Goggles hesitating, trembling, a new person arrived on the platform. He was a squat Coke can of a man on whom a desperately stretched swimming cap sat. The first thing he did was explain he didn’t have all day. Then he looked around, his knees seemed to go soft, and with a shudder and a muttered “fuck” he took the ladder back down. When Moose stopped smiling it occurred to him to do the same. Pride before a fall.
Red Goggles was finally primed to jump. “Fear does not exist in this dojo!” he cried, and with that announcement he cannonballed out of sight. He wailed all the way down and the impact, when it came, was closer to a crash than a splash. Sparks of water flew up. The surface healed.
The way the warm platform eats up the evidence of your presence. The way it shrinks your footprints to the size of a child’s, then an animal’s, then a nothing. The water was a tiny cool blue sheet that seemed, in these moments, to want to break your smallest bones. His heart was beating light and fast and a shift of cloud threw half the pool into shadow.
On the tip of the platform were two dusky oval shapes formed by all the feet that had gone before. He settled his soles on these ovals, blinked to stop the walls turning. He did his first high dive at the age of twelve, looking at his own awkward knees and rubbing his sweaty palms against his stomach, his father cheering him on from below. His father who seemed to come alive when watching his son succeed, a man usually so carefully contained within himself, shy and jokey and perhaps a little bitter, sharp features that made his moods look worse than they were.
Hurl yourself into the soundless blue or take the ladder back down. No-no-no and yes-yes-yes.
Oh, fuck it. Always was an over-thinker.
He was only forty-five and there was nothing much wrong with his muscles and Moose now found the arrogance to bounce, to ask the air for eloquence, just like he used to do over and over when competing at a meet. As his feet began to leave the platform he knew he was getting only half the push he used to get but he was up now, up, blood hurtling through his body—the friction of travel in his teeth.
Yes, he thought. This is what it’s like.
Loosely bound to the room around him now, held by no ties at all, everything hushed and hesitant as it is before an accident. He tucked into a somersault, drew his knees into his chest, fingertips touching shins. Sky. Tiles. The whole gleaming ceiling of this old public pool. Colours bled into one another as a second somersault came. Through his knees a flash of water as he tumbled towards the tank. Fast now. The windrush. Steady.
Spotting the ceiling for the final time he moved from tuck to open pike. His body thinned as he arced down into the pool with the beauty—the overdetermination—of a dream. Forty miles an hour. Back straight and toes together. Hands angled to make a hole he could climb inside. For a moment he was Louganis, gunning for gold, an odd hovering perspective on himself. The water opened without protest. The warm green world took his weight.
Advice from his old coach Wally came to mind. Bending your back underwater gets your shins to vertical. Spreading your arms stops air bubbles breaking upward. Heart beating quick in the deep, feeling himself starting to smile, water creeping in through his lips as he awarded himself a 7 out of 10.
Moose lingered beneath the surface a little longer than necessary, enjoying the leggy shadows and livid pools of light. He broke into the sharper air, drew breath. Blurred shapes became precise. The lifeguard seemed to be clapping and the boy next to Red Goggles cried “Skill!”
Poolside he stood tall, water streaming from his body, the bones in his chest on fire.
“Show-off,” Freya said.
“Sportsman,” he replied, panting.
“Big splash.”
“Untrue.”
“No water left in the pool.”
He risked a glance at the tank and saw that it was full. He told her she wasn’t a very supportive daughter. In response she touched a throbbing vein in his shoulder. “Huh,” she said, very thoughtfully. There were moments when love burned up in his throat and he didn’t quite know how to move.
—
That morning at work he felt immense. His elation was up there with the time Viv had said through trembling lips that she’d marry him. The time he first held his newborn daughter in his arms. The time a couple of years ago when he’d seen Louganis attempt a 307C, the so-called Dive of Death, and pull it off with style.
It wasn’t until sixish, trying to get the end-of-day admin started, that a thick tiredness began to cling to Moose’s thoughts, rendering everything slow. If he had gone to university. If he hadn’t assumed, stupidly, that a life in sport might open up. If he’d been the sort of person to stick at teaching—the sort not to see a deathly circularity in that noble profession. Might be a guy at the head of something now. Head of department. Headmaster. Able to give his daughter more than she needed. Instead, at university, if he eventually convinced her to go, she’d have to stack shelves on lectureless days to help pay the rent on a room. He decided to have a ten-minute power nap, his frequent solution to the ifs of introspection. If you’re going to get stuck in your own head for hours, might as well make it a dream.
There were a lot of rooms free, the hotel only 30 per cent full this week, but he chose a single on the top floor. He lay on the carpet so he wouldn’t crease the sheets. His reveries had no right to unmake such a beautiful bed. He took it all in from a low angle. The mahogany wall shelves. A little oak corner cupboard. An antique gilt overmantel mirror. A cedar chest of drawers that smelt like a fresh pack of pencils. Like fatherhood the hotel made him bigger. Like fatherhood it kept him tired. The carpet was soft, the curves of the lamp were soft, he was asleep.
“Moose?”
He was surfing a cheeseboard on a wave of ice cream.
“Moose? I tried to knock. Are you OK?”
Through waterlogged lashes he saw a hand reaching down towards his arm, fingernails on his forearm that were perfect pastel moons—moons that belonged to Marina.
The double o she emphasised in Moose. The way she brought out in his name a friendly farmyard innocence no one else seemed to know was there. When he opened his eyes fully she was smiling and sitting on the edge of the bed. One leg was swung over the other, the shine of the tights and the curve of the calf, a glittery little shoe hanging off the tips of her toes. She moved a stray hair from her forehead, a sleepy gesture that killed him.
“Hell—” he said. His chest hurt. His back hurt. He abandoned his attempts to get up and he cleared his throat of static, the recent teenage swings in mode and tone. “Hello, Mari. How’s life?” The ceiling light gave her an absurd little halo.
“Good,” she said brightly. Skin and hair. Health. She was looking down at him with curiosity but sidestepping the obvious question (why the hell are you lying on the floor?) because she was better than that, or knew him well enough to see his plan, or accepted that he was a man who got himself into tricky positions.
“I looked everywhere,” she said. “And then I remembered this is your nap room.”
“It’s been a while.”
<
br /> She nodded and smiled, looked at the ceiling. He stared again at her hands. They held some of the few available hints that the better part of her thirties had passed. The nails were perfectly attended to, but the flesh around the knuckles was weathered. Slight bumps, pretty gullies, prominent estuaries of faint blue veins around which wrinkles formed. Also the tiny lines squinting out from the corners of her eyes and the way her skin seemed to have thinned around the cheekbones. Such flaws gave him hope. He planned to find more over time.
“Is there a problem, Mari?”
“Problem? No. I would not say problem.” She patted her knee. “A small issue with humane resources, maybe.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “But if this is a bad time…”
“Do I look ridiculous down here, Mari?”
She shrugged. “Yes,” she said, her eyes flashing the way they always flashed when she said “yes,” like it gave her great pleasure to be positive. “You look a little ridiculous.”
Those flashing eyes. When she was angry her rages were legendary. Last December a lazy male member of staff, caught in a web of lies after an incident involving a smashed chandelier, had backed into a Christmas tree to get away from her. The lobby had been bright with broken baubles, shards of light reminiscent of the incident that had first caused her fury. James Newman swept up the mess with tears in his eyes, mouth closed, straightening the tree as she issued instructions.
More common, though, were the moments when she would stretch and sit back in a chair in the midst of a crisis. On these days she’d explain to an employee, using no more than ten or twelve words, exactly what he or she should do to address the concerns of the guest in question. Confronted with particularly rude customers, she’d shyly glance away from their abuse. They’d begin in the silence that followed to feel a little awkward, their blood starting to cool, and that was the moment when she’d turn her gaze back upon them, eyes fuller than ever, and their awkwardness would harden into fear or confusion or simply melt down to nothing. “Excellent” was a word she used to good effect. They trundled away, dazed. Excellent? What was excellent?
He and Marina had first got acquainted when he was in the midst of a long losing streak. He’d come back from New York, out of work, Viv left behind in the care of that guy called Bob. Being cuckolded by a Bob had felt like a new nadir in the already low-lying terrain of Moose’s middle age. Was she only interested in people with stupid names, or what? He was searching for a new place to live, seeking refuge in the familiarity of Brighton, forced to spend weekends receiving advice from his outspoken mother, abandoned careers in teaching and private tutoring and diving and diving coaching behind him. (Also the aeronautical engineering plans that his mother liked to tell her friends had never quite got off the ground.) Separated from his wife. A newly motherless daughter at his side. Three thousand six hundred pounds in debt. If he’d met Marina at a better time in his life, he might have given off an aura of achievement. Sometimes an aura could be enough. Sometimes an aura was everything. The paradoxical thing was that he so respected her reluctance to lower her standards. He viewed her lack of attraction towards him as a sign he’d been right to try. Meanwhile her unreachability made her more and more alluring.
She was saying something about him working too hard.
“No no,” he said.
“Yes yes,” she said.
“Just making sure everything goes well for the conference. Putting the hours in.”
“The promotion.”
“Oh.” He waved a hand around to better dismiss the idea.
“It’s Karen.”
“What is?”
“The humane resources issue.”
It would be a terrible thing if anyone ever corrected Marina on this humane versus human stuff. It would be a gleam of uniqueness gone. “Tell me,” he said, and closed his eyes to picture the problem.
“It seems she has been getting herself involved with a man with marital entanglements.”
“As in?”
“He’s married,” Marina said.
“Right. I see.”
It was quite fun lying here like this. A hint of what therapy might be like?
“There was punch,” Marina said.
“What, like fruit punch?”
“Like fist punch.”
“Oh.”
Marina coughed. “Yes. She punched the married man just outside the hotel. Well, outside the Conference Centre.”
“Not ideal, but it’s probably not our problem, if it wasn’t on our property.”
“The married man is a guest, though, actually. The one who Karen punched.”
Moose opened his eyes. “Fuck.”
“Yes. Was a guest. He left now.”
“That Stephens guy?”
“How did you know?”
You could always tell. There was something primal in the eyes of certain guests.
“Anyway,” Marina said, “I am dealing with it, but I know you like to know.” She uncrossed and recrossed her legs; he looked away.
“A complaint isn’t what we need right now, Mari.”
“How would they find out?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think they are busy running the country. You look tired these days, Moose.”
“What?”
“Tired.”
“Thanks, Mari.”
“No problem,” she said, smiling. “Don’t make a habit of staying late, yes? A man needs balance in his life.”
“You’re right, I suppose.”
“It is not healthy to get as stressed as you do.”
“I don’t get stressed.”
“Obsessed, I meant.”
“That’s a worse word. You’re going the wrong way.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes again. “You’re a good therapist, Mari.”
“I learned from my therapist. She is good.”
“You have one? What could you possibly need one for?”
Marina shrugged. “Back home everyone has a person. The men cheat, and the women are beautiful. Anyway, she said—my therapist said—that happiness goes outward, not inward.”
“Wow,” Moose said. He sensed there was something profound nestled in this idea, something worth rummaging around for. “What do you think she meant?”
“I think she meant what she said.”
“Right. Of course.” There was dust balled up underneath the radiator, fleecy dust that had no business being there. “I did a dive today, Mari.”
“Boys,” she said, shaking her head.
5
Mornings at the beach were often beautiful. No choice but to admit it as true. There was none of the haste of the afternoon. Less of the intrusive arguments between adults. Less gross rubbing of groins. Less mating rituals. Less slapping of bad kids’ bums or spreading grease onto hairy backs. The expanse of pebbles sloping down to the water’s edge was uncluttered. You could pick your spot and make it your own, the way you made your bedroom your own. Not so much with posters and branded duvet covers as with pure familiarity: knowing the shades and textures that filled every bit of your domain; knowing which stain was the beer stain and which was blood and which loose floorboard concealed the cigarettes you’d stolen from your dad. The air glowed. The sea was full of colour. Everything was rich with light and warmth. Even the seagulls seemed relaxed, content to ride the wind with rigid wings or glide down with care for bits of weed, saving their techniques of total intimidation for the lunchtime crowd and their cones of delicious chips.
She was sitting on the beach beside Susie, both of them sipping pulpy orange juice through straws, shivering slightly in the sunlight. Sarah and Tracy had both gone on holiday this week, a break before starting uni. There would be new friends waiting for them at uni, probably. Boyfriends, definitely. Colourful anecdotes forming in her absence. But there was still the beach, and she was here, and Susie had been left here too.
“Four o’clock,” Susie s
aid, and casting her eyes at that angle Freya re-engaged with a game they often played: imagining themselves into the lives of strangers.
“A police detective,” she said. “You can tell from the choice of snack.”
“American,” Susie said.
“No, Canadian. If he was American it would be a ring doughnut.”
Susie nodded in acknowledgement of this self-evident truth. Her neck was long and pasty, a length of white icing, and her hair was a mass of fiery orange spirals moving in the wind. A pensive expression bunched the freckles on her face. She was too thin and tall for ordinary clothes, and too ginger-skinned for ordinary make-up. Her limbs had the look of objects recklessly arranged, liable to come apart in the event that they were ever required to coordinate for sport. She liked to wear black T-shirt dresses in natural fabrics with dark green tights underneath.
“Background?” Freya said.
“He used to live and work in Canada, where his mother is from. But he got frustrated with the way the local government aids and abets drug addicts there, by supplying them with needles. But he’s actually totally wrong. Because you’re better off giving them clean ones than letting them spread disease.” Susie slurped at the last of her juice, the sleeves of her thick cardigan pulled down to her fingertips. An agitated expression came over her. “Also,” she said, staring at the guy in question, “he hated the way, in Canada, surveillance of criminals was curtailed by the lawmakers? He loves surveillance. Makes him massively horny.”
Massively horny was one of Susie’s favourite phrases. In Freya’s mind it always conjured a lumbering caveman. They looked out at the West Pier. Surfer John, made so small by distance, was paddling on his board, waiting for a wave. He was another of the hotel employees, a year or two older than both of them. A number of the female staff members took their breaks at times that allowed for a glimpse of him here.
“Still looks good in a wetsuit,” Susie said.
Freya agreed this was no mean feat.
Susie clapped her hands. “He loves to follow people around. He spends a lot of time finding out who people are linked with, how they manage to afford their cars with apparently no job.”