Buch lesen: «Swimmer»

I

YOUR FIRST AND LAST MEMORIES were of butterflies …

… Of watching the Red Admiral as it tracked patches of watery sunshine across the garden. It was like an illustration from one of Dad’s books, animated – too beautiful to be alive. Vivid and gay but serene, silent: what you had taken for the sound of its wings was the beating of your own heart. You could feel its flutterings on your nerve ends.

Before Dad’s identification you’d named it already, in the fast-receding synaesthetic language of babyhood, MRRLYMBRXBRX. You called, and for a moment it rested on your knee, so light that you felt no tickle of contact, its wing-rows of unblinking black eyes looking back into yours. Then, with a sudden urgent resolve, it began to rise in a tightening spiral until, seeming to pierce the flat grey clouds, it disappeared.

‘Where has it gone?’ you wailed.

Mum sighed: ‘Heaven, I suppose.’

Dad said something about preferring moths, but you hated those diamond-faceted eyes, the nightly sound of their hairy bellies slapping on your windowpane. They went away if you turned out the lights but you were too afraid of the dark: if one ever touched you you’d die – ‘Kill not the moth or butterfly,’ said Dad, ‘for the last judgement draweth nigh.’

You used to scream a lot, especially when plucked from your long-cooled bath. Your feet thudded against Mum’s chest: shutting your eyes, it seemed, no longer made you invisible.

‘She’s a bad girl!’

‘No,’ said Dad, ‘she’s a mermaid, a nixie.’

It wasn’t the water itself that you loved, more that the feeling of suspension gave you some illusion of flight – like when you’d clutched your birthday kite, a tiger-fanged Chinese demon, before a Primrose Hill wind twitched its string from your mittened hands and bore it down into the hazy silver city.

At Worthing, aged five, you learned to swim. Dad had left you on the beach, to seek inland the graves of famous writers: Mum took off her belt and tied it around your waist, then grimly led you to the sea. For a moment you were scared – the water seethed and pummeled at you like tiny indignant fists – then realized that it was all in play, that this new, white world was welcoming you, that these whispers and roars were a language you understood, that the tides beat with the same pulse as your circulating blood, that you were not so much discovering as returning.

You splashed, swam, flew. When Dad returned you no longer needed towing: ‘We should have called her Woglinde! Wellgunde! Flosshilde!’ Mum looked depressed again, as if things hadn’t quite worked out as planned. You edged further and further out, ducking regularly to scry the muddy depths, somehow knowing just how to breathe. Then you surfaced to warning shouts: a huge wave was ahead, like a rushing steel wall … but you struck out straight towards it, only to see it part miraculously to let you through – just as well, you thought, otherwise you’d have smashed it to vapour.

By the end of the week you had two distinct strokes: Dad’s thrashing ‘Not Drowning But Waving’ style, and Mum’s stately crawl. On the way home, Dad stopped the limping hire car to picnic on the Downs: as you lay on your tummy eating crab and cress sandwiches you realized that your legs were still automatically scissoring away. Suddenly you were enveloped by a mass of tiny, pale blue butterflies: it was as if the sky had exploded and all its pieces were now floating gently down.

‘Lysandra coridon poda,’ said Dad. ‘The Chalkhill Blues. Here for the horseshoe vetch.’

‘He knows everything about everything,’ said Mum, ‘and it’s never got him anywhere.’

Dad assumed a silly German accent to quote his particular hero, that philosopher with a name like a sneeze: ‘To me, the butterflies and soap-bubbles and whatever is like them amongst us seem most to enjoy happiness.’ On the back of his white shirt the Chalkhill Blues were forming regular lozenge-shaped patterns: you thought you could hear them giggling but then realized that it was you.

When you got home you went straight upstairs and jumped out of the window. Still filled with the butterflies’ lightness you didn’t even bother to flap your arms, but you must have had some intimation of failure because you cleared the soaps and shampoos from the bathroom sill so as to fall on to the merciful softness of Mum’s precious zinnias and not the concrete under your bedroom.

‘You don’t need to fly—’ Dad was holding you unhurt in his arms ‘—that’s what your imagination’s for!’ Mum stared in silence at the ruined flowers.

You began to live for the swimming pool. You’d always been awkward, always falling over, into or through things and supposedly inanimate objects went out of their way to cut and bruise you, but now that you’d found a truer element you felt like one of those gods that Dad talked about, who assumed human form to walk the earth. It was as if a sedulous shell fulfilled all school and family commitments, while your essence remained behind, safely submerged. The water was always different: warm or freezing, choppy or calm, technicolour blue-green or yellow and sudsy like in the washing-up bowl, as if the pool had its own unpredictable weather, its independent seasons. The chlorine smell was somehow reassuring, reminding you of Mum’s breath. Even so, every time you dived in – the classic spear entry came naturally to you – there was the vestigial hope that you might just hover, then ascend, slipping through the roof’s retracted skylight and up into the blue, so that when you did hit the water it was always – much as you loved it – a slight disappointment. Increasingly bored with your classmates’ surface noise and bustle, you’d sink to the bottom and just stand watching your air bubbles turning into tiny fish and sea horses and the eddies making your butterfly bracelet seem to flutter and grow.

One afternoon a strange little man was at the poolside, scribbling in a red notebook, watching you. Afterwards your teacher led him over: she said he was The Coach. He pushed and pulled, hefted and lifted you – as if he were contemplating eating you. He was covered in hair: yellow, orange, red and white gradations on his head, face covered with black dots and spines, ear lobes fluffed like dandelions, nostrils tamped with dark shag like Dad’s pipe. He tugged your ponytail, bent your ankles – ‘High plantar flexion,’ he said – then, pressing his brown paws on to your shoulders, looking hard into your eyes: ‘A butterfly, I think’ … Later, when the changing-room had emptied, you went to the mirror and, contorting yourself, sought your nascent wings.

‘Strength! Stamina! Suppleness!’ Coach was shouting. He swore by The Three Ss, The Ten Dos and Ten Don’ts, The Cycle Of Learning, The Golden Rule and The Big No-No. Your arm-entry points might have been perfect, your dive angle shallow, your undulation minimal, but it still hurt. Hamstring, sartorius, gracilis, psoas: muscles you didn’t know you had introduced themselves through pain. Butterfly wasn’t an elegant floating but a desperate thrashing: not the stroke you’d dreamed of, by which you’d be carried in the direction and at the speed desired with no more exertion than a thought. Coach was making you force the water to do what it was willing to do anyway: it was as if he’d stuck boxing gloves on your hands and thrust you into a ring with your best friend.

Not that you had a best friend. Or a worst enemy – or indeed any particular intimacies or antipathies. For some reason you were made to spend your days among children: you watched them in the playground – their massings, alliances and sunderings, as if they were being blown about by winds you couldn’t feel. They seemed to be a different species, like the things that Dad sometimes showed you through his microscope – alien, though no doubt in some obscure way necessary. Your breathing sounded like a steam engine but theirs was imperceptible, their chests remaining as stiff as the walls. You thought of one of Mum’s favourite sayings, ‘Most people don’t even know they’ve been born,’ and saw your classmates – amorphous, diffuse, floating – as foetuses still. They radiated smugness, serene in their amniotic fluid of months, years, lifetimes, while you had only minutes, seconds, fractions of seconds. Life for them was an endless stream, but for you it had become a succession of countdowns: Coach’s stopwatch had atomized time. The girl next to you in class did nothing but sit and stare, stare and sit: you could have swum two lengths in the time it took her to retie her sandal-straps. Whenever you spoke to anyone they’d blush and stammer, part-frightened, part-thrilled, as if you’d been a talking tree or bird. Your teacher told Dad that the whole school had a crush on you, but you weren’t flattered: you imagined them advancing in a phalanx to flatten and smother you.

You never thought of yourself as being a child. When you made the Regional Junior Squad, now a four-stroke swimmer, you binned your one-eared teddy bear, Buddenbrooks-so-called because he resembled another of Dad’s favourites, Thomas Mann. You dropped ballet. Coach said, ‘We can’t let her arms run behind her legs. Kangaroos can’t swim.’

‘It’s art, not callisthenics,’ said Dad, but the piano lessons had to go too, though not before he’d speculated about getting a Bechstein to float.

‘Strength! Stamina! Suppleness!’ … ‘Stupidity! Stolidity! Senselessness!’ – Dad parodied it in his German voice. He was at every practice, squatting precariously on his camp-stool, oblivious to your trouncing everyone at broken sets, never looking up from his poetry, those bewildering snakes and ladders of seemingly unrelated words and letters. The other parents moaned incessantly about their sacrifices of time and money or jumped around yelling threats or encouragement, chiming in with Coach’s motivational chants: ‘Work to win! Win to work!’

‘Arbeit macht frei,’ observed Dad, finishing the TLS crossword with a flourish. The others called him Mr Stupid, presumably because that was how he made them all feel. You looked at him with a tight, sick feeling, never sure whether you were proud or ashamed.

Training took place first thing in the morning and late evening, before the pool opened to the public and after it closed. School allowed you to miss Prayers and Period One and to sleep through many others. At night you felt you were calming and soothing the water after its ten-hour mauling, as if it were a nervous horse. There was something magical and transgressive about being there, as if you were burglars, spies or ghosts. Reflections danced and shifted on the ceiling like half-visible spirits. The day’s laughter, splashings and shouts seemed to have combined in a continuous echo-pattern, like the barking of dogs: when you surfaced you sometimes feared you’d be ringed by snapping, red-eyed curs. You liked the morning sessions best, as the dawn light crept like a flood tide up the walls and the only sound was an unending soft exhalation and the surface was so calm and glassy that your dive’s cleaving of it seemed to be a greater miracle than flying.

You felt yourself trading molecules with the water in an ever-deepening intimacy that remained volatile, never easy, never secure. In motion you weren’t sure if you were fleeing or in pursuit, swimming towards something or away from it. Sometimes the water was tender, at others it scratched your skin like sand: having caressed you it would suddenly punch you in the gut. One evening, shivering with the flu, nose and eyes streaming, hardly able even to climb on to your block, you found yourself, on entry, completely cured … but next day, feeling back at full thrust, you were drained after thirty seconds, facing hours of unrelieved agony. Increasingly, though, how you felt made no difference to your times: your muscles had taken over and left your feelings and thoughts and your pain, dissociated, to drift away.

As the endorphins kicked in and you torpedoed up and down the pool you often thought of butterflies – sometimes even keeping an eye out for them, as if they too might have decided to switch their allegiance to water. Whether because of Mum’s sprays or global warming they were never to be seen in your garden now. Perhaps you just didn’t have the time to watch for them or perhaps they were avoiding you. Finally, if one had appeared you would have been as surprised as if salmon had begun to nest in the poplar tree. In one of your waking moments at school you’d learnt that the Greek word for butterfly was Psyche: it also meant soul. And there had been a butterfly-goddess, too:

Surely I dreamt today, or did I see The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

You loved Keats but never let on to Dad because you knew he loved him too.

One morning at seven you were all gathered at the side of the pool, listening to Coach: ‘Do your time, do your time! Don’t look at the others. Don’t even think about the others. Just do your time, do your time!’ He made it sound as if you were prisoners, in for a long stretch, with no parole or pardon. Suddenly there appeared behind him a dirty, bristled man, wearing a corded tartan dressing-gown … legs wide apart, leaning back so that his head looked heavenwards, he whipped it open. You all dived, screaming, back underwater, as Dad and Coach dragged him away, but you’d glimpsed that there’d been no hair, no … winkle between his legs, just a bubble-gum-pink expanse: a flash of nothing.

Competition was the price you had to pay for spending so much time in the water. Not that it was particularly competitive: at local, national and junior international levels you just won and won, absently, without any real pleasure. You didn’t like having to turn in races and go back again, as if you’d forgotten something: the 100 metres was only the same 50 twice, the 200, four times. Swimming back through your own wake you always feared that you’d crash into yourself coming the other way. They should have built pools that expanded or contracted to the required length, or huge circular ones in which you’d spiral round until you reached the centre. At the climax of a race your vision would always begin to fog: it was as if you were heading into a shimmering grey light – you’d reach out but it would remain tantalizingly just beyond your hand’s final touch on the rail. Even when you won you were disappointed: you’d look at your empty hands and then have to move out for the next race, although you could feel the water trying to hold you there, clinging to your legs like a lonely, desperate child.

You were also guesting with other clubs, hunting wild card invitations to European meets, but Mum and Dad never came to watch you race: it hadn’t been discussed, just tacitly understood that you all wanted it that way. Coach and the ASA arranged the transport, accommodation and chaperoning. Dad kept up your cuttings book: in among your triumphant progress he interpolated his own imaginings. There were mocked-up headlines: NORTH LONDON GIRL SWIMS TO THE MOON … MERMAID SIGHTED NEAR GRAND UNION CANAL – and photomontages of you with a scaly tail, pursued by Neptune in his Triton-drawn chariot, your goggled, strabismic eyes unaware of three breaking shark-fins and Nessie’s snaky neck, or receiving your five County medals from a Cranach Venus naked except for her jewels and fur hat … and your Junior Gold from Karloff’s Frankenstein monster.

When you weren’t swimming you were exercising or sleeping – at school they taught in whispers so as not to wake you. Coach had you running, pounding the pavements in a daily bastinado to Somers Town and back: sometimes you’d whirl your arms in the hope that rotoring into the air might give you some relief. You loathed it, but somehow Coach could always tell by looking in your eyes whether you’d skived. ‘95% isn’t enough,’ he’d say, ‘100% isn’t enough! … Strive! … And give me 105! … And then … give me 110!’ He racked and taxed you with dips, pulls, press-ups, burpees, weights. At home you had a twelve-exercise muscle circuit from garage to attic. Yoked like an ox, you’d spend hours in the living room stepping on and off Dad’s massive two volumes of Sir William Rothenstein’s red-chalk drawings of forgotten ’20s celebrities, watching over and over your favourite video, Love Story. You silently mouthed Oliver’s killer last line to his martinet father: ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Dad had known the man who had written it: ‘Well, he got his thirty pieces of silver, but he’s finished as a serious classical scholar.’

Dad was quieter these days. Sometimes on the cross-London rail journeys to the Crystal Palace Olympic-size pool he’d sit staring into his book, but the page would never turn and his eyes would flicker as if the words were dancing around. As you waited for the last Northern Line back from Waterloo two coppers always hassled you. ‘Excuse me, sir … Is this your … daughter?’ You’d watch the departure board stuck at NEXT TRAIN: HIGH BARNET – 1 MINUTE for a quarter of an hour as they flicked the ends of your wet hair, brushed against your hips and bottom or just stood looking at you with burning eyes. You’d pray that a drunk or a black man would appear to draw them away. Dad used to ask, ‘Why is there never a criminal around when you need one?’ Your faith in him had recently been seriously shaken by the welkin. It was what he called water, the sea, and you’d adopted it because of its resonances of health and close affinity, but when you looked it up in his OED you found that it actually meant the sky.

At fourteen you graduated to the senior squad. Coach wangled you a sports scholarship to the public school where he was co-ordinator of games, but there were still the fees to be found. Dad took on extra work: stuffing envelopes at the Church Commissioners’, cramming Japanese students for Goldsmith’s and, for three months, doing the night shift at a petrol station. ‘It’s the first proper job I’ve ever had,’ he joked. He’d sit watching the weird shadows flitting across the rainbow grease, his fingers shifting on the baseball bat they’d given him, as if on the keys of his beloved Conn tenor saxophone, long gone into hock.

‘All these sacrifices,’ said Mum. ‘All that money. And for what?’

‘For nothing,’ Dad laughed. ‘That’s the point of sport: it’s pointless. A glorious waste of time – though not quite as glorious or as pointless as art.’

Mum lit another cigarette, like a holed, pursued battleship putting out smoke camouflage. You wondered how anyone could think that being the best in the country or even the world was pointless, for nothing. Finally the oil company sponsored you for the rest of the money. ‘I’ve been bought off,’ said Dad, rather sadly. With his beard and big books he’d apparently been scaring away not only the robbers but the customers: they thought he was a black magician.

The new school stood at a confluence of howling Northern winds, large and black like Castle Dracula, but shored up with strutted white-wood CLASP extensions which led to silos containing an athletics track, squash and tennis courts and a fifty-metre pool. The moorland birds didn’t sing, just rattled or shrieked their alarms, and there were no butterflies among the burnt heather stubs and gorse, only – in summer – fat and unnaturally aggressive bees. At least the girls here didn’t moon about but got on with things – somersaulting, swimming, running – but they had an alarmingly mechanical quality, their arms and legs appearing to be jointed like dolls, their glassy eyes rattling and rolling in their sockets. ‘Send in the clones,’ observed Dad on his only visit. He too had noticed that they all had the same permanent, infolding smile: ‘Like the Mona Lisa crossed with the Thurber hippopotamus that has just eaten Dr Millmoss.’ These girls’ only crushes were on themselves.

It was like a prison or a monastery: an edgy sodality with its impenetrable private language – swimmers’ argot, backslung TV catch phrases and an endless roll of nicknames. Tooting, Cheesy, Shaky, Claret … some girls had dozens but you had just these four. You used to get purple-faced after you’d been training flat out – hence beetrooting, through rooting to Tooting; then you’d puke bile and the colour would fade to leave on your skin white lumps like cottage cheese, hence Cheesy; and then you’d tremble uncontrollably for a few minutes, hence Shaky – they used to hum Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘This Old House’ when you walked into the dining room. Claret was because your nose often bled when you got really excited, especially during the wait for a relay changeover …

But there was also a fifth name, the one you weren’t quite meant to hear: at first you thought with a shock that it was ‘Psyche’ they were whispering, but then realized that the moniker that your silences, tempers and hard elbow-points had earned you was Psycho.

The other girls needed to highlight such flaws in order to live with the irritating but ineluctable fact of your beauty. You were the one they always used for the training films, for the posters, manuals and brochures. You even looked good modelling the national team uniform: the skirt’s stiffness somehow folded into sunray pleats, the clumpy shoe-heels lengthened and narrowed, even the awful ribboned straw hat seemed chic, its brim following a salty downward curve until, as if caroming off your left eyebrow, it ascended, just kissing the top of your ear en route to infinity. For hours in front of their mirrors the others sought in vain to achieve that perfect angle until forced to concede what they’d suspected all along – that what had been perfect was you. ‘The Botticellian Butterfly’, one newspaper styled you: set among simple heartiness you looked poignantly inappropriate – embodying delicacy not strength, suppleness not power, your pallor affirming above youth and health some terminal but romantic malady. Your expression was always solemn, even when smiling, but your body always appeared to be well-pleased with itself.

In the school, Karen was your one close friend – or, at least, the only other girl who, while not being a misfit or a rebel, was also somehow tangential. She had suddenly emerged from nowhere – well, from Yorkshire – as your main butterfly rival. Having finished second to you in the Nationals, she was now beginning to overhaul you in practice. If you didn’t care about winning you now discovered that you also hated to lose. Karen was painfully shy, permanently blushing, always ducking her head to avoid eye contact. You loved her gentle voice but she never said much, except once when she tried to get you to teach her how to ‘speak properly’ – your North London accent sounded positively regal to her. You spent countless hours back to back on the SCR sofa, snoozing and listening to Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle again and again – you never did work out what it was all about.

One day, after practice, she told you that Jesus Christ – complete with beard, crown of thorns, pierced hands, feet and side and a sorrowful, all-knowing, all-forgiving look – had been swimming alongside her in the next lane. He’d been doing only a sort of fast dog paddle, but had managed to keep up with her OK. He was trying to tell her how she could swim through her own body and out into the realm of pure spirit … but she said that she hadn’t been able to hear him properly for all his splashing about.

Jesus didn’t come back, but Karen began to sing hymns in the shower, then shaved her head and starved and flagellated herself. ‘All butterflies are crazy, like goalkeepers,’ said Coach. ‘It must do something to the brain.’ They took her away from school, but you didn’t understand why they also felt it necessary to drop her from the team – through it all, her times had been unaffected. Although you did miss her you also felt a certain relief: you breezed the next Nationals at both distances. Sometimes you worried that her madness might have been contagious. To swim out of your body into pure spirit: in those final metres when exhaustion set in and the grey haze descended, you felt as if you might have known all too well what Karen – or Christ – had meant.

The world – as Coach liked to say – was your lobster. You could confirm that all major countries had airports, streets with people and cars, and interchangeable hotels with beds of varying discomfort. And the water was always wet – although some of the pools in Mediterranean countries did have moss or mould growing up the sides. In Spain it was so turbid as to appear bottomless: Coach claimed to have glimpsed the masts and funnels of sunken ships. Your winning grab for the rail nearly broke your wrist: afterwards, measuring the pool, you found it to be twelve centimetres short. ‘Spanish metres must be different,’ said Coach. The water behind the Iron Curtain was always ice-cold, with a rusty taste, as if it had been long-stored in cans. Once, in Prague, something stabbed into your push-off foot on the first turn: pain and shock goaded you into frantic activity. On the third lap you realized that you were swimming back through a rose-pink cloud of your own blood. Desperate, you exploded again, to record your fastest-ever time. When they checked the wall there was no apparent cause: you suspected Coach, who had often speculated about deploying blowpipes or cattle-prods. Doc blinked at the inch-long spine he’d tweezered out of your sole: ‘Medical science confesses itself baffled,’ he said, ‘unless a porcupine was passing by.’ Afterwards, the Czechs presented you with a massive medal of dark wood like a cask-lid, carved with a strange animal – half-bear, half-chicken. ‘It’s a nice place to visit,’ said Coach, as he did about everywhere, ‘but I wouldn’t want to live here.’

In the Europeans you finished fourth, behind two stubbled, steroided East German hulks and a cork-skinned Russian who, pre-race, had been pumped full of oxygen-rich new blood. They snarled at you as if they’d only taken the drugs as a handicap and felt that you were cheating by not cheating. You knew that with an effective testing system you’d have had the gold and, for your subsequent fifth and sixth in the Olympics and World Championships, silver and bronze. ‘You’re just unlucky,’ sighed Coach, ‘in a few years’ time we’ll be able to do it, too.’ Remembering the Russian girl’s face – blank-eyed, drooling – you didn’t feel particularly deprived. At least you’d always done your time, done your time – indeed, you usually improved on it, so that you were regularly defeating yourself. What you really loved was setting records – no, breaking records, smashing them. You had a mental picture of a hovering vinyl round – some music you hated like ‘This Old House’, Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddup You Face’, or Dad’s booming Wagner or Slim’n’Slam 78s – a big black shiny zero that was blotting out the sun … which suddenly exploded into flying shards and grey dust, as if hit by a sniper’s bullet, allowing the light to come flooding through.

At the end of the competitive season the other squad members would fall into heavy, silent depressions, but you were secretly pleased at being able to resume unmediated contact with the water. While they hibernated you embarked on prodigious long-distance swimming programmes. Coach, fearing that you’d lose your edge, was always trying to stop you. ‘You need your speed! Need your speed!’ he kept saying, but to no avail. Fifty miles in twenty-four hours: another disk – the British Endurance record – went smithereening. You were the queen of the Charity Swimathon: most of the Navy had sponsored you at a pound a mile – afterwards they sent a telegram: YOU’VE BANKRUPTED THE FLEET BUT THE FLEET STILL LOVES YOU ANYWAY. They helicoptered you out to an aircraft-carrier for the admiral to present you with a door-sized cardboard cheque. Then the sailors three-cheered you and bore you round in triumph. Even though you felt your swimsuit ride right up at the back, there were no comments or wandering hands – they looked at you without lust, with a sort of bashful reverence. Perhaps all the best men joined the Navy: or was it that the sea’s lulling rhythms had taught them kindness and love? After they’d piped you away you looked back, eyes misting, to see the deck a fluttering mass of white caps, waving.

Coach was at the centre of your world. Despite his sloganizing, sulks and foot-stampings, you all loved him. He knew just when to pressurize and when to slacken off, whether to threaten or cajole. And he was always fun: sometimes you’d slap his spreading pink tonsure, with a sound like a fish hitting a marble slab, and he’d chase you, growling like a bear, flicking at your legs with his blackboard pointer. You knew he was just a big softy by the way he draped his arm around your neck, massaged the stiffness out of your shoulders, gently squeezed your forearm at the end of a really gruelling session. And when you won – or even did your time – he’d hug you so hard that you’d feel you might go right through him and out the other side … and weren’t those tears in his eyes? Dad had strangely stiffened up around your twelfth birthday – no more kisses or sitting on his knee – as if you’d committed some unforgivable crime. On visits home you felt as if you were shrinking, getting colder and colder: Mum’s lap looked as distant and unattainable as Mount Everest. The school doctor had put you on the Pill to regularize your periods for competitions: when Mum found the packet she slapped your face and then, having listened to your tearful explanations, nodded and slapped you again.