Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Moose lingered beneath the surface a little longer than necessary, enjoying the leggy shadows and livid pools of light. He broke into the sharper air, drew breath. Blurred shapes became precise. The lifeguard seemed to be clapping and the boy next to Red Goggles cried ‘Skill!’

Poolside he stood tall, water streaming from his body, the bones in his chest on fire.

‘Show-off,’ Freya said.

‘Sportsman,’ he replied, panting.

‘Big splash.’

‘Untrue.’

‘No water left in the pool.’

He risked a glance at the tank and saw that it was full. He told her she wasn’t a very supportive daughter. In response she touched a throbbing vein in his shoulder. ‘Huh,’ she said, very thoughtfully. There were moments when love burned up in his throat and he didn’t quite know how to move.

That morning at work he felt immense. His elation was up there with the time Viv had said through trembling lips that she’d marry him. The time he first held his newborn daughter in his arms. The time a couple of years ago when he’d seen Louganis attempt a 307C, the so-called Dive of Death, and pull it off with style.

It wasn’t until sixish, trying to get the end-of-day admin started, that a thick tiredness began to cling to Moose’s thoughts, rendering everything slow. If he had gone to university. If he hadn’t assumed, stupidly, that a life in sport might open up. If he’d been the sort of person to stick at teaching, not to see a deathly circularity in that noble profession. Might be a guy at the head of something now. Head of department. Headmaster. Able to give his daughter more than she needed. Instead, at university, if he eventually convinced her to go, she’d have to stack shelves on lectureless days to help pay the rent on a room. He decided to have a ten-minute power nap, his frequent solution to the ifs of introspection. If you’re going to get stuck in your own head for hours, might as well make it a dream.

There were a lot of rooms free, the hotel only 30 per cent full this week, but he chose a single on the top floor. He lay on the carpet so he wouldn’t crease the sheets. His reveries had no right to unmake such a beautiful bed. He took it all in from a low angle. The mahogany wall shelves. A little oak corner cupboard. An antique gilt overmantel mirror. A cedar chest of drawers that smelt like a fresh pack of pencils. Like fatherhood the hotel made him bigger. Like fatherhood it kept him tired. The carpet was soft, the curves of the lamp were soft, he was asleep.

‘M oo se?’

He was surfing a cheeseboard on a wave of ice cream.

‘M oo se? I tried to knock. Are you OK?’

Through waterlogged lashes he saw a hand reaching down towards his arm, fingernails on his forearm that were perfect pastel moons — moons that belonged to Marina.

The double o she emphasised in Moose. The way she brought out in his name a friendly farmyard innocence no one else seemed to know was there. When he opened his eyes fully she was smiling and sitting on the edge of the bed. One leg was swung over the other, the shine of the tights and the curve of the calf, a glittery little shoe hanging off the tips of her toes. She moved a stray hair from her forehead, a sleepy gesture that killed him.

‘Hell—’ he said. His chest hurt. His back hurt. He abandoned his attempts to get up and he cleared his throat of static, the recent teenage swings in mode and tone. ‘Hello, Mari. How’s life?’ The ceiling light gave her an absurd little halo.

‘Good,’ she said brightly. Skin and hair. Health. She was looking down at him with curiosity but sidestepping the obvious question (why the hell are you lying on the floor?) because she was better than that, or knew him well enough to see his plan, or accepted that he was a man who got himself into tricky positions.

‘I looked everywhere,’ she said. ‘And then I remembered this is your nap room.’

‘It’s been a while.’

She nodded and smiled, looked at the ceiling. He stared again at her hands. They held some of the few available hints that the better part of her thirties had passed. The nails were perfectly attended to, but the flesh around the knuckles was weathered. Slight bumps, pretty gullies, prominent estuaries of faint blue veins around which wrinkles formed. Also the tiny lines squinting out from the corners of her eyes and the way her skin seemed to have thinned around the cheekbones. Such flaws gave him hope. He planned to find more over time.

‘Is there a problem, Mari?’

‘Problem? No. I would not say problem.’ She patted her knee. ‘A small issue with humane resources, maybe.’

‘Oh?’

She nodded. ‘But if this is a bad time …’

‘Do I look ridiculous down here, Mari?’

She shrugged. ‘Y e s,’ she said, her eyes flashing the way they always flashed when she said ‘yes’, like it gave her great pleasure to be positive. ‘You look a little ridiculous.’

Those flashing eyes. When she was angry her rages were legendary. Last December a lazy male member of staff, caught in a web of lies after an incident involving a smashed chandelier, had backed into a Christmas tree to get away from her. The lobby had been bright with broken baubles, shards of light reminiscent of the incident that had first caused her fury. James Newman swept up the mess with tears in his eyes, mouth closed, straightening the tree as she issued instructions.

More common, though, were the moments when she would stretch and sit back in a chair in the midst of a crisis. On these days she’d explain to an employee, using no more than ten or twelve words, exactly what he or she should do to address the concerns of the guest in question. Confronted with particularly rude customers, she’d shyly glance away from their abuse. They’d begin in the silence that followed to feel a little awkward, their blood starting to cool, and that was the moment when she’d turn her gaze back upon them, eyes fuller than ever, and their awkwardness would harden into fear or confusion or simply melt down to nothing. ‘Excellent’ was a word she used to good effect. They trundled away, dazed. Excellent? What was excellent?

He and Marina had first got acquainted when he was in the midst of a long losing streak. He’d come back from New York, out of work, Viv left behind in the care of that guy called Bob. Being cuckolded by a Bob had felt like a new nadir in the already low-lying terrain of Moose’s middle age. Was she only interested in people with stupid names, or what? He was searching for a new place to live, seeking refuge in the familiarity of Brighton, forced to spend weekends receiving advice from his outspoken mother, abandoned careers in teaching and private tutoring and diving and diving coaching behind him. (Also the aeronautical engineering plans that his mother liked to tell her friends had never quite got off the ground.) Separated from his wife. A newly motherless daughter at his side. Three thousand six hundred pounds in debt. If he’d met Marina at a better time in his life, he might have given off an aura of achievement. Sometimes an aura could be enough. Sometimes an aura was everything. The paradoxical thing was that he so respected her reluctance to lower her standards. He viewed her lack of attraction towards him as a sign he’d been right to try. Meanwhile her unreachability made her more and more alluring.

She was saying something about him working too hard.

‘No no,’ he said.

‘Y e s yes,’ she said.

‘Just making sure everything goes well for the conference. Putting the hours in.’

‘The promotion.’

‘Oh.’ He waved a hand around to better dismiss the idea.

‘It’s Karen.’

‘What is?’

‘The humane resources issue.’