I was mystified. It was only when I relayed the entire conversation to D later that evening that he pointed out that Patrick had probably said ‘sediment’ rather than ‘cinnamon’. Ah.
I daydreamed about this former self, the one who had never tasted a river, and after ten minutes or so I looked up, trying to get my bearings. The river was wider than I had expected, much wider than it was in Littlehampton, and the three of us, swimming at a similar pace, were taking wide zigzags rather than staying tight to its curves. I had never seen a river this wide from within. The banks seemed high and inaccessible, whereas we were low, eyes at water level, seeing the world as a duckling might. Like them, I was unable to fly, making our sunken position between the banks an inescapable one. The only way out of the river was to finish the course. There were kayaks within view, but no markers to demonstrate how far we had swum or how far we had to go. And as the route had several curves to it, there was no chance of seeing our final destination yet. I steadied my breath, chose a tree in the distance, and told the others I was aiming for that then planning to take another pause to get my bearings.
And so we continued. Swimming for ten or twelve minutes at a stretch; pausing to right our course, checking that we were all still feeling strong, then onwards. I had swum for an hour continuously in the pool, but it had always been punctuated by pauses in the shallow end. I had at least practised in open water by now, if only for about fifteen minutes of continuous swimming. But this was unlike anything I had ever experienced: we were inaccessible, plunged into nature, swimming our way home.
A beat started to form as I felt my stroke lengthen and become more confident. My breath, my body, my surroundings. We passed under bridges. We swam alongside curious swans. And I’m sure we passed over more than a few fish. All the while, there was a terrible freedom in not knowing how far I had come and how far I still had to go. Every marathon, every half-marathon, even every 5K training run, had been dictated for so long by pace, time and goals. Now, I had no idea. I knew that I wanted to be swimming, I knew I was swimming, and so I swam. On and on. Exhalation, exhilaration, exhaustion.
This, I suspected, was as close to the state of flow as I had ever felt. I had done long training runs in the past where time had appeared to pass with some elasticity, so complete was my absorption in what I was doing. But this was entirely new sensory territory. With almost nothing to look at beyond my hands’ repeated motions and the bubbles they were creating, nothing to hear except the roaring of the water being forced forward by my exhalations, and nothing to taste other than the river itself, my senses seemed to reach a deep state of relaxation.
When I had first moved to Brighton, I’d been transfixed for months by the horizon, finding an enormous sense of rest in seeing the curve of the earth every day after nearly fifteen years in a dense urban environment, increasingly surrounded by screens, walls and endless moving detail. I became convinced my eyeballs were happier – not just my sense of well-being, but my actual eyeballs. When I visited the optician, she confirmed that I was right. When you are always looking at things close to you, the muscles behind your eyes are in a state of almost permanent contraction. By looking into the distance, day after day, those muscles relax; hence the sense that my eyes themselves were happier in their new home. Now, as my eyes had nothing at all to stare at, and my other senses were receiving similarly uncomplicated messages, something inside of me unfurled and let go.
This sense of contentment was unshakeable. I tried to worry – how much further did we have to go? How much more tired might I become? – but the rhythm of the river kept my heart rate steady. Just as I felt the tiredness creeping to the tips of my fingers, and starting to dull my legs, something remarkable happened: the river sped up beneath me. So this was the magical current I had been told about. I was reaching, catching, pulling the water, but somehow each stroke was taking me further than ever before. Even when I paused and looked up, still I moved forward, strong and smooth. As if it knew that I was starting to fade, the river was helping me out. All those flying dreams where my arms were in front-crawl position seemed to be coming to life.
I heard shouting from the riverbank. ‘Don’t miss the exit!’ A man in a high-visibility jacket was waving at our group. ‘Just under the red bridge now!’
I looked ahead. The red bridge was only a few hundred metres away! I recognised it from the walk from the train station. The man, I now realised, had been shouting because the river was moving so fast, we might swim straight past and head out to sea.
‘I’m still feeling strong, I’m going to keep going at this pace!’ I said to my companions, who were now slightly behind me. They waved me on, grinning, and I headed for the bridge. The mass of swimmers had thinned out now, and we were spaced about ten metres apart. I found strength in my arms, legs and lungs as the bridge swooped above me and the tower of the RNLI headquarters became visible. Home! I was going to make it!
The river was surging stronger than ever before as it neared the ocean, threatening to take me past the exit and straight out to sea. I swam diagonally, and managed to reach the ramp without being swept away. As I tried to stand upright, I felt my blood and organs lurch inside of me. After being cradled for so long in the moving water, the sensation of being tipped to standing felt more wrong than right, and I staggered, scrabbling for a sense of balance.
D was waving to me from the riverbank. I hugged him, drenching him with river water, and he took a photograph of me. I was giddy with the thrill of having braved the unfamiliar and swum for longer than I had ever dared believe I could. It was impossible to push back the tide, it was impossible to predict the weather, but I had learned anew that it is ever possible to defy our expectations of ourselves – even if, as D gently reminded me as we feasted on fish and chips an hour later, those who love you believed you could do it all along. A lesson I was going to have to cling to over the coming months.
CHAPTER SEVEN
To Ithaca
Finally able to swim in open water, beyond the pool or my home beach, I let myself believe I was up to taking on a challenge I had been dreaming of for over a year, and had found tantalising for much longer: I wanted to swim in the Greek waters of the Ionian Sea. Specifically, I wanted to swim to Ithaca, the island home of Greek hero Odysseus.
Since childhood, I had been fascinated by Greek myths and the heroic tales of the Trojan War. The stories provided the sort of nerdy, hearty adventure that I loved hearing about, while the flamboyant, emotional antics on Mount Olympus fanned the flames of my increasingly passionate understanding of the world. Goddesses taking petty, brutal vengeance after suffering a broken heart; burly men dragging each other around in the dust in a decade-long war started by a pretty face – these were the issues my 1990s self dreamed of day and night. As I grew older and read classics at university, it became Odysseus who captured my imagination more than any other. By now, it wasn’t just his war heroics that mesmerised me, but his ten-year voyage home from Troy to Greece.
Legend has it that Odysseus was within sight of Ithaca when the bag that Aeolus, the god of wind, had given him was opened while he slept by his over-curious crew. All hell – and indeed, all winds – was unleashed, and the ensuing storm meant that the ship and crew were blown hundreds of miles off course. It took several years to get home after that, not helped by Odysseus being held captive by the amorous Calypso for seven years. Yup, seven years he was stuck on that island with the nymph, who was desperate to have him as her mortal husband. Meanwhile, his actual wife Penelope stayed at home on Ithaca, busily spending every night unpicking the embroidery she had completed during the day, having promised her suitors that she would marry one of them just as soon as her sewing was finished. Eventually, a full decade after Odysseus set out from Troy to return home, they were reunited. Sometimes you have to wait for the one you love.
It had been nearly twenty years that stories of his voyage had been stirring a yearning in me for a place to call home. Until the previous summer
, I had not had anywhere that I really felt was home. My mother had grown up in the West Indies, to parents from France and Colombia, my father in Cornwall, but my father’s work in the military meant that we had moved house every couple of years throughout my childhood. When I finished studying, my decision to live in London was based on convenience and the heady glamour of Britpop rather than any sense of wanting to make it my home. Home had only ever been where the ones I loved were.
Now, Brighton was home, and our flat – despite the soggy aftermath of the flood of the previous summer – was the first place I had ever felt as an adult that I truly belonged. This was less to do with my surrendering to the idea that falling in love and getting married made everything okay, and more because I had been on my own odyssey for the best part of a decade before that. I never wanted to be Penelope; instead, I had fought for years to be my own hero, my own Odysseus. I wanted my sense of belonging to come from within, and as soon as I found that, I found D. Now that I had my own Ithaca, I wanted to see the real one – and I wanted to do it across the sea.
Unfortunately, my husband had not been entirely privy to my inner quest, and merely thought I wanted to go on holiday.
‘But it’s HEROIC,’ I said, leaning sassily against the kitchen table, with my swimming towel draped across me in a manner that I liked to think brought to mind a Grecian youth. He agreed quietly and started to unload the washing machine.
My trip may well have been heroic to me, but my husband’s job is also frustratingly noble stuff, employed as he is in equalities work in Brighton. Consequently, there ensued some tense marital negotiations: his busy summer schedule, working on both Pride and Trans Pride, the dates available to take the trip, and the amount of time I would need to ready myself to swim five kilometres per day were all taken into consideration.
There was one extra deadline we were contending with: after a year of marriage and even longer of trying for a baby, we had recently been referred for IVF treatment. My family is almost indecently prolific with its offspring – my mother is one of five siblings, all of whom have three or more children. My first cousin even has two sets of twins.
The idea of having to navigate fertility treatment was not one that I had seriously considered. But that spring, after a series of tests for both us, we were told that if we wanted children, IVF was the route we must take. I was shaken by the news. My relationship with my body had changed radically over the last few years. Finally learning to have a little faith in what it was capable of had been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Now, I was being told that positive thinking and a sensible training plan was not going to be enough.
The afternoon we were given the news, I sincerely felt that I had been robbed of a future life experience. An essential connection was not working between us. The thing we had both wanted for so long was so much further from our reach than we had ever imagined.
That evening, I sat and watched, softly sobbing, as a pale April sea lapped gently against the pebbles. Whether it’s sweat, tears or seawater, salt water cures everything, my grandmother had told me. Well it couldn’t cure this. I wondered what ever could.
The fug of sadness lifted somewhat once we had been to some initial consultations and had the procedure explained to us. I would take the contraceptive pill for a month to stop my menstrual cycle. Then I would have weeks of self-administered injections to act on my pituitary gland, stopping the production of natural hormones to control the release of eggs from my ovaries, followed by two or three weeks of further treatment to stimulate my ovaries into creating more than the average one egg per month. Finally, after several scans a week to monitor their progress, I would take one final, precisely timed shot to make me ovulate, before having an operation – under full sedation – to remove the eggs I had created. In the lab next door to where I was lying unconscious, these would be introduced to my husband’s sperm, and if we were lucky enough to create any embryos, one would be put back into my uterus a few days later. The combination of drugs, scans and significantly more invasive medical procedures than I had ever anticipated meant that there was no way I could take a swimming holiday in the middle of the treatment, which was the only time D could go away.
Thus, the decision was made: I would go to Greece alone, before treatment began. Much as I longed to take the trip with my husband, circumstances meant I really did have to be my own Odysseus this time.
Six weeks later, I was on my way to the island of Lefkada, where I was going to spend a week in a small family-run hotel as part of a guided swimming trip around the islands of the Ionian. It would be a final chance to experience that sense of flow, the relaxation, the rhythm of nature, restoring my faith in what my body could do, regardless of the limitations it was putting on me. It would be an opportunity to see what I was capable of in the water, and to remind myself of the barriers I had overcome, even as I was now confronting a new one.
I spent the weeks before the trip researching Greek politics. The financial crisis that summer meant that by the time I was on my way to Gatwick, the country seemed to be on a knife edge. The Foreign Office was advising travellers to the country to take all the money we would need in cash only, as automated bank machines were no longer permitting non-nationals to use them, and queues inside banks were enormous. News broadcasts were also encouraging tourists to spend whatever we could in local shops and tavernas in order to pump money back into the economy. The thought of travelling alone seemed more daunting than it had done for years. The sooner I got to Greece and began to distract myself with my aquatic challenge, the better.
The evening I arrived was heavy with heat and the Mediterranean holiday hum of fans and cicadas. In the distance, a kitchen radio was babbling away as we all gathered on a terrace overlooking the sea to introduce ourselves and eat together under the vines. J, the leader of the trip, encouraged us to go around the table saying a little about ourselves and our swimming experience. This was the moment when I realised just how enormous my capacity for over-optimism could be.
‘Hi, my name is Jess and I recently swam the English Channel as part of a relay with some mates.’
‘Hi, my name is Michael. I came on this trip last year and take at least one swim trip abroad each year.’
‘Hi, my wife and I are regular Masters swimmers in the South of France; these are our times …’
‘Hi, I’m on this trip with my teenage daughter as a rest before her Olympic tryouts.’
And so it went, on and on. These were people who had swum for their country, who had swum across their country and who had swum to their country. Yes, they all seemed very friendly. But they may as well have been a different species. It was certainly going to be an interesting week, even if it turned into one that cost me the use of my arms.
The first morning, after a quick breakfast, we met in the bay by the guest house and boarded a beautiful wooden boat named Mowgli. It had a cabin, a shady canopy at the back, a generous deck at the front and a taciturn Greek captain who made no effort to hide the fact that he despaired of all of us and our sanity.
The pattern for the week was quickly set. We would get on board with what we’d need for the day – little more than suncream, hats, goggles and flip-flops – and as the boat headed out to wherever the swim was to begin, we would be briefed on deck about what type of swim it would be. Some were coastal, all the way around an island, with plenty to look at below us; some would be crossings from island to island – more satisfying, but potentially much harder work. And some would be a combination of the two. For most of the week we would have a morning swim, lunch somewhere nearby, then a bit of time on the boat before a second swim. Friday would be the exception, as that was the day of the heroic five-kilometre swim from Kefalonia to Ithaca.
En route to our first swim, we were talked through the various safety measures that were non-negotiable on the trip: we had to wear goggles and suncream, and we would all have the seams of our swimsuits Vaselined up for us. We weren’t to do it ou
rselves, as that would inevitably lead to hideously smeared goggles. Instead, one of the trip leaders would do it, wearing a pair of surgical latex gloves. After that, we would enter the water in three separate groups, divided according to ability and denoted by different-coloured caps. Each group would be followed by a small rubber rescue dinghy, driven by one of the instructors, containing bottles of water, mouthwash, some food and a first aid kit. Freedom, and safety.
First we had to be divided into our groups, so the boat’s initial stop was at a small bay, where we were asked to get in and swim for about three or four hundred metres, watched by J. I hadn’t warmed up, or even been in the water yet. I was nervous, flustered, but determined not to let myself down by panicking like I had done in the past.
Clambering cautiously down the boat’s ladder that first time, the water was cool against my hot skin but still felt like a warm cup of tea in comparison to Brighton’s on-the-rocks chilliness. It was thick with salt, which, on initial entry, gave the sea an almost trampoline-like amount of bounce. But once my face was in, I experienced the other side to the salt, which quickly coated the inner rim of my lips as I exhaled, slack-lipped, into the blue. I closed my eyes, kept myself calm, concentrated on my stroke and swam the distance. Then I headed back to the boat, where I was immediately assigned to the bottom group.
That decided, we took it in turns to swim towards and then past one of the instructors, who was filming us underwater so that later in the day our strokes could be analysed by the group. It was an enlightening afternoon, sitting at a bayside taverna in front of a large TV, watching all of the different ways there are to do the same thing. Among us there were swimmers whose legs barely moved, whose legs kicked in near frenzy, whose arms swung out wide or whose arms barely seemed to bend at all. As with running, I was realising that everybody is different; each of us carries a lifetime of scars, sprains and surprises. No kink was the same, no movement comparable. Seen individually, there were those who looked as if they would barely get through the water at all, though when I watched them in the group, I could tell that they were comfortably beating some of the others. Likewise, my stroke was okay, but my strength and experience much less than the rest of the swimmers.
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