Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

So I began to paint the walls of our room. I quickly forgot my initial doubts at Clancy’s whim and made up for them with gratitude. I suppose I was really flattered and touched by the idea Clancy had of me, which only corresponded to some idea I secretly nursed of myself, as an artist, producing wonders in some garret.

My painting lacked skill, and the subjects were predictable — palm trees, paradisial fruits, lagoons, native girls in flowered sarongs, all stolen from Gauguin. But I knew what I was really painting and Clancy knew what I was really painting and what it meant. Each native girl was intended to be Clancy; and each one, it was true, was slightly less crude and ungainly than its predecessor, so that one day I really hoped to capture Clancy in paint. All through the early part of June I painted the first wall, while Clancy wrote to her uncle, describing my great talents and saying how few people truly understood life. To be happy and occupied seemed easy. You found a place of your own and made love. You rented a squalid room in Bermondsey and painted Polynesian scenes on the wall. Clancy’s more extravagant fancies didn’t seem to matter. Once she wrapped her arms round my neck as I cleaned my brush: “I had a letter from Uncle today. When we go to Suffolk you’ll paint there, and write poems, won’t you? All the painters painted there.” I didn’t answer this. As for being a poet, I didn’t get beyond Sonnets and Lyrics of the English Renaissance. I was content as we were.

Then things changed. Nothing fundamental altered, but a host of minor things that had never bothered us before began to affect us. The dirt of our room and the smells of the tenement which we’d been heedless of up till then because we were preoccupied with each other, began to irritate us. This was odd because it was just at the time when I was transforming our little hole into a miniature Tahiti that we began to sense the filth around us. Before, we’d tipped all our rubbish, empty tin cans, milk cartons and vegetable peelings, into old grocery boxes till they overflowed, and we’d hardly noticed the stink or the swarms of flies. Now we bickered over whose turn it was to carry the rubbish boxes down to the dustbins at street level. We felt our lack of changes of clothes, even though we seldom wore any. Before, we used to wash clothes, because it was cheaper than the launderette, in an old two-handled zinc tub we’d found propped under the sink; and we’d washed ourselves in the same way, one of us sitting in, laughing, while the other tipped water over us. Now Clancy began to hanker after showers and proper laundering. Somehow we stopped thinking the same things together and wanting to do the same things at the same time — make love, eat, sleep, talk — which had meant that in the past there was never any need for decisions or concessions. Now the slightest things became subjects for debate. We began to get insecure about being found out and dragged back to the homes we’d left, even though we’d survived for nearly three months; and at night the noises in the tenement, the scufflings and shouts on the stairs made us nervous. Clancy would start up, clutching herself—“What’s that?! What’s that?!”—as if the police or some mad killer were about to burst in at the door.

Even the endless sunshine, which was such a blessing to us, began to feel stale and oppressive.

We were aware at least of one, unspoken reason for all this. Our money was dwindling. The figures in Clancy’s Post Office book were getting smaller and smaller and the time was coming when we’d have to get jobs. We’d both understood that this would happen sooner or later. It wasn’t so much the having to work that depressed us, but the thought that this would change us. We wanted to believe we could go out to work and still keep our desert island intact. But we knew, underneath, that work would turn us into the sort of creatures who went to work: puppets who only owned half their lives — and we’d anticipated this by stiffening already and becoming estranged from each other. Maybe this was a sort of defeatism. Clancy started looking at the job columns in newspapers. We’d existed quite happily before without newspapers. It was a sign of how different things were that I’d watch her for some time sitting with the pages spread in front of her, before asking the needless question: “What are you doing?”

“Looking for jobs. What’s it look like?”

“If anyone’s going to get a job it’ll be me,” I said, tapping a finger against my chest.

Clancy shook her head. “No,” she said, licking a finger to turn over a page, “You’ve got to perfect your painting. You mustn’t give that up, must you?”

She really meant this.

“You’re not going out to work while I piss about here,” I said, feeling I was adopting a stupid pose.

Then we had a row — Clancy accused me of betraying ideals — the upshot of which was that we both went out the next Monday looking for jobs, feeling mean and demoralised.

There was a dearth of employment, especially for school-leavers. But it was possible to find casual, menial jobs, which was all we wanted. Clancy got a job as a waitress in a pizza house near the Elephant and Castle. I went there once and bought a cup of coffee. She was dressed up in a ridiculous white outfit, with a white stiff cap with a black stripe and her hair pinned up like a nurse. On the walls of the pizza house there were murals with pseudo-Italian motifs which were worse than my pseudo-Gauguins. I looked at Clancy at the service counter and thought of her lying on the bed in the sunshine and swimming in the muddy creek in Suffolk and how she’d said: “Paint me.” It was so depressing that when she brought me my coffee we said “Hello” to each other as if we were slight acquaintances.

I got a job in a factory which made lawn-mowers. Bits of lawn-mower came along on moving racks and you had to tighten up the nuts with a machine like a drill on the end of a cable. This was all you did all day. It turned you into an imbecile.

Three or four weeks passed. We’d come in, tired and taciturn after work, and spend the evening getting on each other’s nerves. We thought, once we left our jobs behind then we’d return to our own life. But it wasn’t like that. We brought our jobs home with us as we brought home the day’s sweat in our sticky clothes. Clancy was still serving frothy coffee; I was still tightening nuts. Clancy would slump on the bed and I’d stare out the window. Work seemed a process of humiliation. I looked at the scrap-heaps and demolition sites which once we’d been able to ignore, which we’d even transformed into a landscape of happiness. I thought: We’d escaped, in the midst of everything we’d escaped; but now the tower blocks and demolition sites were closing in. I made an effort to keep cheerful. I read out poems from the book and I explained to Clancy how I was going to finish my mural. But she didn’t listen. She no longer seemed to care about my artistic talents. All she seemed interested in were the letters from her uncle, and when one arrived she’d read it over in a lingering, day-dreamy way and not let me look at it. It was as if she were trying to make me jealous.

Once, as I was flipping through Sonnets and Lyrics , I came across a poem I hadn’t noticed before. “Here,” I said, “listen to this.” And I read aloud:

Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight,

With feathers like a lady bright …

I thought she would like it.

She whipped the book from my hands and flung it across the room. It landed under the sink, near the zinc tub. It was a good, solid book; and it wasn’t even mine. I watched the pages come away from the binding at the spine.

“It’s crap! All the poems in that book are crap! Artificial, contrived crap!”