O Chin - Now That It's Over

It was Cody’s idea to take up swimming as their extra-curricular activity in Primary Six. The swimming lessons were held twice a week after school, at a swimming pool only five minutes’ walk away. After lunch at the school canteen, Wee Boon and Cody would walk there and flash their school passes to gain free entry to the pool. They would change into their trunks at the changing room, and head for the main pool where the coach, a pot-bellied man with leathery skin, would be waiting, along with other students of the school’s swimming club. While Cody learnt to swim the breaststroke adequately after only three lessons, able to complete a lap without panicking, Wee Boon was still struggling to keep his body afloat and to regulate his breathing. After each lesson, he threatened to quit, though he never did. The boys were taught other strokes—freestyle, butterfly, backstroke—and practised these by swimming a few laps. While they swam, the coach would bark out instructions from the side of the pool, correcting arm or leg posture, or telling them not to slow down. When they finished their assigned laps, they would hang onto the edge of the pool, splashing water at each other or competing to see who could hold his breath underwater the longest. Sometimes they would tickle or punch each other in the water to make the other person give up, to let go of his breath. In most cases, Cody was the winner, but during those times, when they really wanted to know who could hold his breath the longest, without any trick or disturbance, Wee Boon would emerge the winner; his longest record: two minutes and fifty-one seconds.

After the lessons ended, Wee Boon and Cody would continue to swim or wait inside the pool, since the changing room would be crowded with their classmates and there were only a few showerheads. They would linger until most of the boys had left before they came out of the pool; most of the shower stalls would be empty by then.

One day, after a long and strenuous lesson, Wee Boon and Cody decided to forego the waiting and brave the crowd in the changing room. By the time they entered, all the stalls were occupied, and they had to wait, sitting on the damp wooden benches in front of the stalls. Wee Boon turned suddenly quiet, tapping his feet on the wet floor, his body radiating tension. The boy who was showering in the nearest stall, a fellow classmate, turned his body slightly towards them, and in a glimpse, Cody saw a neat turf of black, curly hair above the boy’s penis. He was not surprised, since he had seen other grown men showering in the changing room, and knew what their bodies had looked like. Around him, in school, he was vaguely aware of the changes that were taking place in the bodies of his classmates: the breaking of their voices, the growth of hair in their armpits and on their arms and legs. While it would be another year or two before these changes occurred to Cody, he knew that he was heading for some sort of a transformation, though the thought itself was not comforting in any way.

When the classmate was done showering, Cody told Wee Boon to go ahead, but he shook his head, telling Cody to go first, that he would wait for another available stall. Cody rinsed himself off; his skin felt sticky even after the shower. He quickly towelled off. Later, when he was busy packing his wet swimming trunk and goggles into his school bag, he did not notice Wee Boon coming out of the shower. It was only when he heard laughter coming from some of the classmates at the other benches that he turned to see what they were snickering at. Wee Boon, naked, was frantically searching through his bag for his towel, and even though he tried to hide it as best as he could, there was something odd about his penis at first glance. At first, Cody was surprised that Wee Boon too had grown some pubic hair, since they were the same age, but what was more surprising was that he was sporting a hard-on. Because it was a new sight to Cody’s eyes, it looked painful to bear: bent upwards, red, angry-looking. In his distress, and amidst the boisterous jeering, Wee Boon’s dick got even harder, stretching out of the foreskin, like a turtle’s head peeking out from its wrinkly neck.

The classmates’ taunting grew louder and more explicit, and Wee Boon snatched up his bag and ran to one of the toilet stalls, slamming the door. Even as they left the changing room, the boys continued to chant names at him; one of them even kicked the toilet door hard as a parting gesture. It was only when all of them had left that Cody offered his wet towel to Wee Boon and coaxed him out of the toilet stall. His face was livid with shame, and he did not look at Cody once while they were making their way home, not even stopping at the snack-food stall where they would usually buy a stick of fish balls or a curry puff to share between them. When Wee Boon reached his block of flats, he ran up the staircase without saying anything.

For the next few days, Wee Boon had to endure a battery of merciless teasing from the classmates who had witnessed his episode at the swimming pool. The news took less time to spread than a match catching fire; before the morning assembly was over, it seemed that everyone, including the girls in their class, was aware of what had happened. The girls giggled and whispered loudly among themselves, about how disgusting it was, how gross, so like him to do it, how dirty, how shameless; their taunting, unlike the boys’, was relentless and vicious. Wee Boon, on the other hand, kept up his composure and silence; the only sign that betrayed his distress was his lips, which were tightly pressed into a thin, quivering line. Sitting beside him those few days was like being near a seemingly calm dog with a muzzle over its jaws, contained and subdued, but only barely. He and Cody did not talk about what had happened; they hoped, separately, for all this to pass, which it did, after another episode of embarrassment from a different classmate, who was caught staring up some girls’ school skirts.

Yet the whole incident shifted something imperceptibly between Wee Boon and Cody, as subtle and permanent as a fissure left behind after an earthquake. They still talked, and still played whatever games they had played before, but there was a distinct, though unvoiced, divide that held them apart. It was as if, now that Cody was aware of Wee Boon’s undeniable transition into a different person, he could not not see who he was: a person who was no longer someone Cody could say he knew well, a stranger who had taken the place of a friend. Even in their closeness, they held a respective distance. It was only much later, when Cody discovered his own inclination towards other boys that he knew what he had been afraid of acknowledging then: attraction. Raw, open-faced desire.

Even after the incident, they did not stop attending the swimming lessons, though they had learnt to wait until all the classmates left before getting out of the pool and showering at the changing room. In their separate stalls, they showered and changed quickly, and avoided looking at each other’s bodies.

Even though the swimming lessons ended after the June school holidays, Wee Boon and Cody continued to swim whenever they could, on weekends and on days free from remedial classes or other school activities. Most of the time, they went together, but sometimes Wee Boon went by himself. At that stage, he had become a more consistent swimmer than Cody, and could easily beat him at freestyle. His body too had taken on a different proportion, lean and broad-shouldered, with hair growing intermittently on his lower calves; his voice had cracked in the midst of their final year in primary school.

One Saturday afternoon, Cody was there early and waited for twenty minutes at the entrance before deciding to go ahead without Wee Boon, thinking he must have forgotten about the appointment. After changing, Cody walked to a corner of the seating area, where there were fewer people, put down his bag and began his warm-up. Scanning the pool, he noticed someone getting out at the far end and stretching his legs. Wee Boon. Cody wanted to shout to him, to let him know he was there, but stopped when he saw Wee Boon staring at a man who had also got out of the pool and was walking towards the changing room. The man turned to look at Wee Boon when he walked past, and from where Cody was standing, he could sense something between them, a sort of tacit agreement, conveyed only by the briefest of glances. Wee Boon paused for a few seconds, and then stepped into the changing room. Cody followed them.