High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  They nodded slowly, like he’d told them the future.

  The Electric House was a local landmark around which the teen population of Brighton carried out the deadly serious business of hanging around. They hung around chatting. They hung around drinking. They hung around practising their kissing. They spent a lot of time pretending to inhale, or coughing. If you had a blind date with a girl they’d arrange to meet you at the Electric and it was a tradition of the time that they’d tell you the exact section of pavement on which you should stand at the designated hour, often referencing chalk marks set down specifically for that purpose: an “X” or an intimidating tadpole squiggle. Seldom did they keep him waiting long. It was a beautiful thing: his luck, his ability; the way the world moved to his tune.

  On Christmas Eve, behind the changing rooms of the big drained Black Rock swimming pool, Angela Hebbethwaite opens her coat, a coat with shoulders covered in snow, and lifts up her several jumpers, permitting him to touch her breast. The left one, the soft floury texture of it. With wordless joy he fondles. The best Christmas present he’s ever had.

  “I’m going to be the next Don Revie,” he tells Angela.

  “I believe in you,” she says. “You’re quite tall.”

  She tucks her boob back into her bra. A drunk Santa staggers past. They listen to Santa having a wee against the wall.

  At this time there were definitely one or two friends and family members who predicted his downfall. It was said that by pursuing so many different sports to County level, then England Under 16 level, he would sacrifice his studies. It was also said by his soon-to-die Auntie Janet (appendix, Wandsworth) that it was “an inevitability” that once The Finch hit sixteen the extraordinary upward curve of athletic achievement that had marked his life to date would begin to level off. Even his mother appeared ready to accept elements of this hypothesis. With her constant curbing of expectations and reminders that “life follows complex patterns,” she seemed to agree that a boy as bafflingly popular and successful as her son would, at some point on the perilous path to adulthood, blink and lose his way. If his father pushed her to give reasons for this lack of faith, she sometimes cited, with the stiff air of someone called to give evidence, Philip’s occasional tendency to speak of himself in the third person.

  The Finch was just a persona, a character other people had made up. It saddened him that his mother didn’t seem to understand.

  In response to what he couldn’t help but see as doom-mongering by the senior females in his family, he did reasonably well in most of his exams. It was essays that were his undoing, but he got extra help from Miss House and Mr. Phillips in English and History. He worked hard—hard-ish—and was in the unusual position of being considered a role model by both pupils and teachers, so it was perhaps no surprise when he was appointed, following an internal school process which he liked to think of as democratic, as Head Prefect. People told him he fulfilled the role with composure, style and a stringent sense of fairness, and he shrugged off their praise, neither emboldened nor embarrassed, his only concession to immodesty being his readiness to make a detailed mental note of their words, remembering certain shapely turns of phrase or terms of praise in case they came in handy at a later date. A job application. A self-awareness test. Stuff like that.

  His dad was a local postman of nine years’ experience, a man with a tendency to sweat in all seasons, and having his son appointed to the role of Head Prefect seemed to give him more vicarious pleasure than any of the pursuits on track and field ever had. This was confusing, given how much emphasis the family had previously placed on sport.

  Soon after the prefect appointment letter from the headmaster arrived he glimpsed, one night, through a crack in the kitchen door, his father sitting at the scuffed pine table on which they always ate their family meals. The memory of this moment is clear even through the veil of drugs. Everything quiet and well lit. His father alone and holding the document in both hands. His lips were moving minutely as he studied it.

  Several days later, The Finch’s father was chatting to the Carrs. The Carrs were neighbours with whom the Finch family shared a small front garden, a love of films, and absolutely nothing else. On this particular day, as The Finch and his father stood in the driveway and Mrs. Carr clutched her garden shears, Mr. Carr asked Mr. Finch what being Head Prefect at a school like Varndean actually involved. It was astonishing to witness the manner in which his father—known throughout the village as being punctual and taciturn—responded to this question. He stood tall. He draped one warm arm across his boy’s shoulders. He relayed, with faultless fluency, the entire inventory of responsibilities which came with the role. He had memorised the letter verbatim.

  Did they have money? Not much, not really, but always a penny for an iced bun. You could get it delivered with the milk each morning. He was never one of the unwashed kids at school who wore plimsolls even in winter or was always being sent to the nit nurse under suspicion of infestation. Sunday mornings at the Sunday school, drawing miracles and parables on unevenly sized pieces of paper, wondering what the point of prayer was, and then there would be home-made lemonade in the church hall, bitter zest that clung to your gums, and wonderfully involved periods of paper-aeroplane construction, games that made all the worship stuff worthwhile, and after that everyone would stop at the old air-raid shelters on the way home, jumping off them in increasingly complex ways, touching ankles twice or thrice, cutting their hands and grazing their knees, all to summon some brief blaze of adrenalin to resurrect their lives from the stupor Father Simon’s words had induced. On one such air-raid-shelter stunt he landed awkwardly, feeling the shock that normally crept up his shins advancing further than before, all the way up to his right knee. Pain grinding there. Pain sending him home in stages, limping and pausing, limping and blinking, limping and hoping he’d done himself no permanent harm.

  Twinges of pain would resurface when, in his final summer at the school, he donned the Varndean athletics vest for the very last time—but only on the home straight, and it was nothing a post-race bag of ice could not correct. He still won the 200 by a clear two seconds.

  His cousin Elizabeth was into gymnastics. Seeing her do a cartwheel during the family performance segment of Christmas Day celebrations, he asked his parents if he could join one of her classes. His father and mother discussed this over subsequent weeks and then informed him that they loved him unconditionally, regardless of whatever his preferences might be. What exactly did they mean? He could go to gymnastics, yes.

  Gymnastics made him feel whole in a way that all the other sports he was pursuing didn’t. It tightened his arms and back, gripped his stomach muscles. In mid-air every part of him felt hard. He was something cleverly put together, complete. His coach told him to start swimming twice a week as a way to improve core strength.

  One winter’s morning when he was nineteen and still living at home, deciding what to do with the rest of his life, or deciding at what point he had better decide it, he took a bus to a pool a few miles away with the intention of swimming his usual lengths. When he got there, he was told he’d have to wait until eleven. The pool was being used by the Brighton & Hove High Dive Club. From a café on the second floor of the leisure centre building he watched the training down below. A man in suffocating swimming trunks teetered on the edge of an absurdly high platform. He flipped himself into the air and twisted and flipped again. The certainty of the process. The fearlessness. Gymnastics with higher stakes. Masculinity and daring. The adoring glances of girls.

  Only one swimsuited witness seemed immune to the exhilaration. She was sitting on a fold-out chair by the pool’s edge. The tiled floor around her was splodged with coloured towels. She had her arms crossed, her legs crossed, and her skin from this distance looked cold but lively, shimmering, a source of cool light, all but a few dark hairs tucked under a rubber cap. She had a graceful nose, long shins. A few years older than him? The training session seemed to be wrapping up. Time to h
urry downstairs.

  Her toenails were painted green. She took a pair of glasses from on top of a towel. Wearing these massive black frames, and still also wearing her swimming cap, she looked like some kind of exotic insect, or a librarian from the future. This was Viv, his eventual wife. She had no head for heights, she’d later say. She was only there to support a boyfriend. Didn’t seem at all fussed that the cap and glasses made her look uncool. Therefore, clearly, she was cool. She was the coolest person he’d seen. Lack of self-awareness has its own perfect appeal.

  Those downturned lips, though. The unmoving mouth. He didn’t consider back then that a sullen look might be the sign of a sullen person, or that she might be a person whose defining characteristic was sullenness, or that this alluring young woman’s inner tonnage of glum might be sufficient to send her sinking, throughout her twenties and thirties, into hot black holes of depression. Or—here was an idea—he did consider all this. It was exactly what drew him to her.

  He stopped staring. Located a man in a tracksuit who was issuing directions. Said to him: teach me how to do this. Thought to himself: forget the gymnastics, forget the football, forget the possible trial for Surrey CC. Probably he was realising, at this time, that he wasn’t getting significantly better at these sports. He’d improved at a faster rate than his peers but had then begun to plateau. He was living in a town where he was once revered, and was now well liked, and where he feared he would soon be simply recognised. He needed a new challenge.

  The decision not to go to university. It took a while to begin to regret it, and to feel bitter about his parents discouraging him. Having not been to university themselves—having known no one except Fancy Harry who had—they were suspicious of what three years of no income might achieve. They pushed him to accept an offer of a teaching job at Varndean. Headmaster Perkins had included within this offer—Maths for the younger pupils, Physical Education for the seniors—a harrowingly sensible-sounding line: “It’s always prudent to have a fall-back plan.” No mention was made of the risk factor inherent in this philosophy. A person with a fall-back plan is actually pretty likely to fall back on it.

  Years later, a scrapbook in one of his mother’s cupboards. It was with a smile that he located the article he remembered so well from his youth, the one with the headline “BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN.” But looking at it now, wrinkled and yellowed, he saw that there was a question mark after the “SEEN.” And how had he missed it, this question mark? What sort of mind failed to spot the rising intonation, the air of qualification, the tentativeness of the whole headline? A punctuation mark, you told yourself. Just a way to end a sentence.

  When he looked at the journalist’s name it was Daniel Rhoden, a family friend. The only quoted expert was his cousin Billy, a Varndean alumnus who came back to coach hockey each Easter term. Billy whose desire to make a pleasing impression was such that he shaved twice a day until he died at thirty-nine, knocked off his bicycle in some little-visited part of Kent. The experience of seeing this article, of pitting remembered reality against its frozen proof, was a slow electric shock for Moose. The jitters kept going for months.

  There are times when your own childhood has the gimcrack feel of a tale told to friends over ale. When it feels like a bar in an old hotel, no television playing, no radio playing, a space that exists outside of events. Crouching before that dusty cupboard, looking at that scrapbook, he wanted desperately to know which page of the Argus the article had been printed on, and what the other pieces in the newspaper that day might have had to say, but the information he needed had been trimmed away. Context had gone in the kitchen bin.

  2

  Inside the Royal Sussex the floor was fiercely mopped. A smell of disinfectant rose up around her. She was back in Ward 3 but couldn’t see him. Possibly he’d been moved into a private room? The nurse over there would know, but she was busy being screamed at by a guy in a pinstriped jacket. As the man’s face became a plum that ripened and promised to rot the nurse stood there nodding, smiling, head inclined to the side, as if researching an essay on rage.

  When the man was out of energy Freya approached the nurse. She was taken to a room that was white and lacking in clutter, a massive improvement on the ward. Everything had a clean, tense neatness—the symmetry of the stacked-up magazines, the flowers sprouting stiffly from their vase, the untouched tissues in their perfect yellow box. By far the worst-looking thing was her father. His skin was as bloodless as his last cigarette and one apparent side effect of the heart attack, unmentioned in the Coldean Library’s medical books, was how it worsened a person’s snoring. She listened in appalled amazement as a ten-second impression of a hay-fever-suffering pug segued into the slow sound of two wounded warthogs making love. She popped a fresh piece of Hubba in her mouth, wished she’d brought her Walkman and a few of her tapes, and at that moment, a bit shaky, needing sugar, feeling warm, thinking there must at least be a Coke machine somewhere—the NHS should surely invest in machines—she swivelled on her heel and saw, too late, a guy skidding around a corner wall with white coat-tails flapping in his wake. His brown eyes came to a halt an inch or two from her face. She thought of maple syrup.

  “Right,” he said. “I was just checking on the patient. Thought I might have heard a cry for help.”

  “That’s just his snoring, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  The doctor—was he old enough to be a proper doctor?—tilted his head to listen. “And you would be…”

  “Daughter.”

  He took a step back. His face was stubbly and sun-kissed, shaped by flattering shadows. “Pleased to meet you then,” he said. “I’m Dr. Haswell.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Haswell. She was impressed. It rang so rhythmically on the ear, was agreeable and grateful in equal measure, sounded wholesome and hopeful. Finch, by contrast, suffered from its extreme brevity and associations with seed-eating. For a long while she’d had a feeling that, in some distant language, her surname meant vomit or saucepan.

  The nurse who’d suffered the shouting bout was coming back down the corridor. As she passed Dr. Haswell she said, “Too young.”

  “What?”

  “Coffee, right?”

  “Hot water and lemon,” he said.

  “Black coffee,” she sang.

  “Hot water and lemon.”

  “With milk, then.”

  “Can you stand it,” Dr. Haswell said, “if I just have water and lemon?”

  “Tea,” the nurse said with a skimpy smile and promptly disappeared.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—Monica, the ward nurse. She’s nuts, that’s all.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and coughed to let him know that the subject was now closed. “So, is he OK?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. When I said nuts—”

  “He. My dad.”

  “Ah, yes.” Standing tall Dr. Haswell offered a friendly frown and proceeded to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Mr. Marshall got that artery unblocked, as you know. I’m not expecting any major problems.”

  “How come he’s a mister rather than a doctor?”

  “Marshall?” Dr. Haswell checked over his shoulder, then fell into a whisper. “Power. No longer needs it. But your dad’s comfortable, currently.”

  “Why did he get moved off the ward?”

  “He’s lucky. It’s not a reflection of medical needs, as such. Hotelier, right?”

  She nodded. The lighting in this corridor was weirdly unrelenting.

  She’d been in the ward late last night. Her father had been sitting up after the operation, the operation that everyone here seemed to prefer calling a “procedure,” but conversation had come only in woozy bursts. Waking this morning she’d felt a shadow of that post-exams feeling—empty, achey, somehow caught in an anticlimax—and also a small sense of wonder. It se
emed amazing to her that a whole week behind the reception desk at the Grand could contain so few achievements when, here in the hospital, in two hours flat, a clogged heart could be unclogged.

  “Complications,” Dr. Haswell was saying now. “That’s the main thing to watch out for. That and instilling a healthier lifestyle. The heart’s a tricky muscle.” He paused for a moment and his brows became depressed. “We need to keep an eye on things, but a couple of days will be fine, I should think, and your father really is in the best possible hands.”

  Freya watched as Dr. Haswell, clipboard tucked under one arm, glanced down at his own palms. She allowed herself a moment of quiet outrage at his arrogance. Someone needed to tell him, without unnecessary offence, that Brighton was unlikely to play home to the medical profession’s best possible hands. That it was, in fact, unlikely to play home to the best possible anything. That his hands, moreover, were not scuffed enough, not torn at by sufficient experience, to be classifiable as Best Possible or even Best-in-Breed. How old was he? Mid-twenties? Straight out of medical school, even. But it was true too, that despite his youthful looks Dr. Haswell gave off an aura of expertise. There was something about the set of his forehead, about the sophisticated mahogany furniture of his face, that suggested cloistered learning. Medical knowledge, definitely, but also other areas Freya had little experience of. Skiing. Multiple gym memberships. Birthrights, etc.

  “Your dad said you’ve recently been celebrating some great exam results? Sounds like congratulations are in order.” He glanced down at her bare legs, as if these were owed the better part of the commendation. “With A levels like that you could pursue medicine, I suppose.”

  “Not really,” Freya said.

  “No?”

  “Didn’t do sciences.”

  “Ah,” the doctor said. “Yes, you need to be able to do the maths…Your father’s already been mentioning some VIPs the hotel is hosting in a couple of weeks. Something to aim for is always good. Hollywood types, I expect?”