Rupert Thomson - Soft

He watched her push her hair away from her face, as if she was walking in a forest and her hair was a stray branch or bramble that blocked her path. He noticed how her bracelet tumbled down her forearm towards the dark crease of her elbow –

Imagine if he told her where he worked!

All of a sudden he began to feel claustrophobic. The girl was still talking, talking, talking — and always about the same thing, the only thing she could think of. He received a vivid, flashed image of the inside of her head. Her brain appeared to have liquefied. Not only that, but it was carbonated too, each cell brimming with frenetic orange bubbles. He could almost hear it fizzing.

The spotlights burned; the room blackened at the edges. Muttering an excuse, he turned and plunged into the crowd …

He emerged at last and stood on the pavement, sweating. Cool air, car horns. The mingled scents of jasmine and fast food. He doubled over, retching. Nothing there. He slowly straightened up again. Lambert had been right to deny him access to the project. Obviously you could get too close.

He leaned against an iron railing, let his head tilt backwards on his neck. A solitary pale-pink cloud floated in the sky above Hanover Square. It looked like something that had been mislaid, he thought, and the strange thing was, its owner hadn’t even realised.

Sitting high above the swimming-pool on a wooden bench, Jimmy watched the officials walk up and down in their white outfits, name-tags dangling on frail silver chains around their necks. At the shallow end, the girls stood about in bathrobes, their faces serious and eager, their voices hushed. Instrumental music filtered at low volume through the sound system. Crystal Palace on a Saturday afternoon.

During the last month and a half he must have phoned the baths at Marshall Street and Seymour Place on at least a dozen different occasions with enquiries about the synchronised swimming, but the training sessions always seemed to take place at midday, or in the early evening, and he rarely left the office before seven. Then, one lunchtime that week, he had tried a new approach. He called Marshall Street and asked if they had a girl training there, a girl with short blonde hair.

‘You mean Karen?’

He took a chance. ‘Yes. That’s her.’

‘She’s just leaving.’

‘Could you put her on?’

There was a jumble of sounds, a silence, then a voice said, ‘Karen here.’

‘My name’s Jimmy Lyle,’ he said. ‘I met you at the Kwench! party. In that hotel in Kensington.’ He paused, hoping he wasn’t talking to the wrong person. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark,’ he said, ‘remember?’

‘That was weeks ago,’ she said.

His heart turned over. ‘I know.’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Slow of me.’

She laughed. ‘You weren’t slow the last time I saw you.’

No, he thought. But there were reasons for that.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a competition. At Crystal Palace.’

‘Maybe I could come along.’

‘It’d probably be boring for you.’

He smiled. ‘Probably.’

So far, though, he had no regrets. Leaning forwards, with his arms resting on the bench in front of him, he felt lulled by the atmosphere, almost drugged.

For half an hour the girls warmed up. They swam rapid, stylish widths of crawl, or else they simply floated in the shallow end, rolling their shoulders so as to loosen the muscles. He noticed Karen immediately. She was wearing a white rubber hat that said WARNING on the front, and on the back, in smaller letters, SWIMMING CAN SERIOUSLY IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH. He watched her drink from a litre bottle of Evian, one hand propped on her hip. He watched her smooth some kind of gel on to her hair. He didn’t think she’d seen him yet.

Then, at two o’clock, there was an announcement, the words merging under the glass roof, blurring into one continuous hollow sound. The judges took their seats. According to the programme, the first part of the competition — ‘Figures’ — was scheduled to last three hours. Only one Karen appeared on the list of entrants — 24. Karen Paley. So now he knew her name.

And suddenly, it seemed, the competition was beginning. A girl in a black one-piece costume swam towards the deep end, moving sideways through the water, almost crablike. When she drew level with the judges, she flashed a smile that was wide and artificial — the smile of an air hostess, a beauty queen. She turned on to her back. Floated for a moment, so as to compose herself. Then executed the required figure — which, in this case, was called FLAMINGO BENT KNEE FULL TWIST. One by one they came, the girls, in seemingly endless succession. They all smiled the same smile, all followed the same sequence of movements, yet Jimmy didn’t find it in the least monotonous. If anything, the opposite was true. He felt he could have watched it almost indefinitely. It was like a highly esoteric form of meditation. The warm air, the green water. The repetition … Looking around, he saw that most people had fallen into a kind of trance — not just the spectators and the officials, but the girls themselves: the way they swam to the side of the pool when they had finished, so languorous, so dreamy, as if they had been hypnotised by their own performances. And, all the time, that music playing — slowed-down, slurry versions of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Lara’s Theme’, Officials in white uniforms, the continual murmuring of voices, music that echoed eerily under a high glass roof … it reminded Jimmy of visiting a hospital, somehow, or an asylum: all this going on, but separate, parallel — cocooned.

At last he heard Karen Paley’s number called, and there she was below him, rolling on to her back and straightening her legs. He couldn’t help noticing her body as she lay on top of the water, her breasts just lifting clear of it, the fabric of her costume clinging. He saw her take a breath. Slowly her hands began to revolve, slowly her head and shoulders disappeared beneath the surface. In less than a minute it was over, and she was reaching for the silver steps and climbing from the pool. While she waited for her marks, she caught sight of him, high up on his wooden bench; the smile she gave him was quite different to the smile she had given the judges only moments before. Afterwards, she walked the length of the pool, her blonde head lowered, as if deep in thought. She moved like a dancer, her bearing upright, her feet slightly splayed. He watched her pick up an ice-blue cloth and, bending, rinse it in the water at the shallow end. She wrung it out and wiped the moisture off her body, then she put on a dark-green robe and a pair of stretchy socks with soles, not unlike the slippers you get on aeroplanes sometimes.

About ten minutes later he heard footsteps and turned in time to see her sitting down beside him.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ she said. She had slicked her hair back behind her ears. A small red mark showed on the side of her left nostril where the noseclips had gripped it. ‘People don’t usually watch the figures. They prefer the solos, the duets. It’s more dramatic.’

‘They’re missing out,’ Jimmy said. ‘I haven’t seen the solos or the duets, but I can’t imagine them being better than this.’

She looked at him warily, thinking he might be mocking her.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘There’s something soothing about it. Almost hypnotic.’

‘So you’re not bored?’

‘No. Not at all.’

She glanced at the clock above the shallow end.

‘I thought maybe we could do something afterwards,’ he said, ‘if you’re not too tired, that is.’