Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

She said this with such venom that I believed her at once. A whole reservoir of delight was instantly poisoned.

“Like those paintings,” she said, getting up and gesturing. “They’re crap too! Sentimental, affected, second-hand crap! They’re not even well painted!”

And at once I saw my Tahitian girls — each one a would-be Clancy — for what they really were: stumpy, stick-legged ciphers, like the drawings of a four-year-old.

“Crap, crap! All of it!”

Then she began to cry, and brushed me away when I tried to comfort her.

It was now past the middle of July. Everything was turning bad. Then, to cap matters, I had an accident with a saucepan of boiling water and scalded myself badly.

It happened needlessly and stupidly. The ledge on which our two gas rings rested was only a rickety affair, held up by wall brackets. The plaster below, into which the wall brackets were screwed, was soft and crumbly and we knew there was a danger of the ledge giving way. I kept saying to Clancy I’d fix it. One day we were making kedgeree. Clancy had put the saucepan on to boil for the rice and I was bending down to scrap something into the rubbish box which was just to the left of the gas rings. Clancy suddenly said, “Look out!” A great chunk of plaster had fallen out of the wall and the left hand bracket was hanging on only by the tips of the screws. Instead of doing the sensible thing and jumping out of the way, I reached to hold up the ledge. Just as I did so the bracket came away and most of the contents of the boiling saucepan slopped over my hands.

I did a sort of dance round the room. Clancy yelled at me to put my hands under the tap. “Cold water! It’s the best thing!” she said, trying to keep calm. But although I knew she was quite right, I didn’t want to do this at first. I wanted to scream and curse and ignore Clancy and frighten her. It was a kind of revenge for her deriding my painting.

“Fuck! Fuck!” I said, waving my hands and hopping.

“The tap!” said Clancy.

“Shit! Shit!”

The pain was bad at first, but it was nothing to the pain that began about an hour later and went on for hours. By this time I was sitting astride a chair by the sink, my arms plunged into cold water, my forehead pressed against the sink rim, while Clancy kept topping up the water, which would start to steam after a while, and sponged my upper arms. It wasn’t pain alone, though that was bad enough. I started to feel shivery and sick — Clancy put a blanket round my shoulders. At the same time we were both silently thinking that perhaps I had a serious scald which needed proper medical treatment. This frightened and dismayed us. It wasn’t just that we feared that a visit to a hospital would lay us open to discovery — we were already worried that our jobs might do that. It was more that going to a doctor would be a sort of admission of helplessness. Up till now everything we’d done, even getting jobs, had been done independently, of our own choosing, and hard though things had got, nothing had made us feel we couldn’t survive by ourselves.

“I’m scared,” Clancy said.

“It’s all right. I’ll be all right,” I said, my face pressed against the wet enamel of the sink. “I shan’t go to any doctor.”

Clancy sponged my arms.

“I didn’t mean it about your painting. Really. And I didn’t mean to throw your book at the wall. I was just depressed.”

Most of that night we sat like that, I slumped over the sink and Clancy sponging. I was too much in pain to sleep. Whenever I took my hands from the water they felt as if they were being scalded a second time. Clancy tried to say reassuring things and now and then her hand tightened on my shoulder. We listened to the trains clacking up and down and the strange noises of the tenement. Only at about four did we attempt to go to bed, and then Clancy half filled the zinc tub with water and placed it by the bed, so that I lay on one side with my arms dangling into water — though I didn’t sleep. Clancy nestled with her arm round me. I felt her doze off very quickly. I thought: In spite of the pain I’m in, in spite of our lousy jobs, in spite of everything, we are happier now, and closer than we’ve been for several weeks.

In the morning there were huge pearly blisters on my hands. The fingers had mostly escaped unharmed but the palms, the wrists and parts of the backs of the hands were in a hideous state. The pain had eased but the slightest touch or trying to bend my wrists brought it back instantly. Clancy got up, went out to a chemist and came back with various things in tubes and bottles including a thick, slimy cream the colour of beeswax. She made a phone call to her pizza house and gave some excuse about not coming in. The fact was that though I could waggle my fingers I could not close my blistered palms and Clancy had to spoon-feed me and literally be my hands. I knew the important thing with burns was to keep the blistered area free of infection and to let the skin repair by exposure to the air. So for two days we sat, out of the direct sunlight, my hands held out in front of us like a pair of gruesome exhibits, waiting for the blisters to go down. Things were like they were when we’d first run away and got our room.

“Will it leave a scar?” Clancy said.

“Probably,” I said.

“I won’t mind.”

“Good.”

“There could be worse places for it.”

Even when, on the fourth day, Clancy went back to work (I insisted that she did — I could just hold a spoon by this stage, and I was worried she’d lose her job if she left it any longer), the evenings were somehow special. They were not like the dull, fretful evenings we had had of late. Clancy would come in, her waitress work over, and only want to know about my hands. We discussed them and fussed over them like some third thing which tied us together. It was as if we had a child. As they began to get better we started to make grim, extravagant jokes at their expense:

“The blisters’ll burst and pus will go flying all round the room.”

“They’ll shrivel up into nothing.”

“They’ll go manky and mouldy and have to be cut off — then you’ll be a cripple and I won’t love you any more.”

I thought: When my hands are better, when I’m no longer an invalid — this happiness will fade.

But though, after a week, my hands were no longer very painful, it was some time — over three weeks — before the skin fully recovered and hardened. Throughout this period I sat idle in the room all day and I noticed, each evening, how Clancy’s mood dulled, how she became tired again and begrudging. She saw this herself and tried to resist it. Once she came in with another brown paper parcel. It was a book— Love Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. She had made a special trip in her lunch break to get it.

“It can’t be much fun sitting here all by yourself all day.”

We had moved the bed permanently under the window now, and I used to sit, propped up against the metal bed-head, looking out, like some dying man on a verandah, taking his last view of the world. I thought about lots of things — in between snatches of Herrick and Crashaw — during those long, hot days. Of the lawn-mower factory — someone else would have my job by now and perhaps no one would know I’d ever been there. Of my parents and Clancy’s parents; whether they really worried about us or had forgotten us. Of Gauguin dying in Tahiti. And I thought about Clancy’s uncle. Clancy hadn’t had a letter from him for a while (she usually had one about once a week), and this worried her. I imagined him sitting, just as I was sitting, a cripple, in his wheel-chair in the sunshine. I wondered whether he really did enthuse about Clancy and our running away or whether it was just the foolish, romantic notion of a tired, slightly dotty old man who couldn’t move. Perhaps, in his enthusiasm, he merely lied for Clancy’s sake, because he was really too sick and worn out to care. I thought about the money that Clancy said he had. I didn’t believe in this money. The money of people with big houses in the country always proves to be non-existent. Or it all gets accounted for in debts and duties. In any case, the money made me uneasy. The more I thought, the more suspicious and sceptical I became. I found I couldn’t imagine the orchard wall, the creek with the jetty. I even began to believe that Clancy’s uncle and his house didn’t exist; they were some fiction invented by Clancy as an incentive — like Clancy’s father imagining he was descended from the aristocracy.