Jonathan Lee - High Dive

His daughter so frequently misunderstood his intentions. His allotment of life was pleasant but undeniably narrow. She was better than he was, a more talented person, and he wanted her to have a whole blazing field of sunflowers. He wanted to tell her that unfulfilled ambitions pile up like unopened post and can clutter a person’s life. He also wanted, at a more bitter and seldom acknowledged level, to explain to her how fatherhood had destroyed his solitude. Explain to her that he used to think — really believe — that he would win an Olympic medal on the diving board. That Viv had in fact been the one pushing for a child. That if one of them was ever going to end up as a single parent he never expected it to be him. That motherhood had finally seemed to kill Viv’s already-slender sexual appetite and that, if it wasn’t for the feeling of aloneness this abandonment had left him with, he might never have poured quite so much love into his daughter, into their early-morning routines with Lego and milk, into the intimacy that left him feeling needed again and brought an almost-pleasure to the hot Sunday task of ironing all her school clothes.

When Freya moved away, who exactly was going to take her place? Was it selfish to think of the gap she’d leave in his life? Needy? Hospitality, fatherhood: service industries. Eighteen years in which everything he did was worked around her. More than four of those with just the two of them, no Viv. At least if she was at university they’d be in the same country. He could visit for lunch on his days off. Maybe on all his days off. He’d take her and some grinning boyfriend out for drinks, torture the guy in inventive ways. And was it inevitable that he’d become his mother, moaning at the lack of phone calls from one’s child, and that Freya would become him, moaning about the moaning? When she went away for weekends he always felt at first a rich sense of possibility. He told himself he would succumb to the advances of one of the lonelier women in the hotel and that he would roll around with this woman on the sofa, cook her eggs for breakfast, drink lunchtime wine. But slowly and surely that sense of possibility would always flatten and sink — there was no rolling around and he drank the wine alone and often the wine was beer — and he’d get up for a bleary, wheaty midnight wee and see that his daughter’s bedroom door was open, no one inside. He’d think, Soon it’ll be empty forever.

He rubbed his arm and caught a glimpse of Barbara. She was scowling but nonetheless permitted him to stroke her. After a while she rolled onto her back, legs akimbo, so he brought her a fresh bowl of Whiskas.

A little after four Moose was coming down the hotel’s sweeping spiral staircase, down and down, 123 steps over which a rich dark carpet flowed, when he started to feel very tired. He noticed also that his jacket was listing to the left. He paused on the first-floor landing and began redistributing coins between flap pockets, aiming for equilibrium, picking out from palmfuls of ten-and twenty-pence pieces those thin squiggles of cigarette-packet cellophane. He caught sight of his reflection in the banisters. Even allowing for distortions, he looked pretty bad. The lobby below seemed gloomy, sleepy. His mouth felt full of putty. Sticky. Odd. He sat down without deciding to sit down.

There was a vase on a console table and it wasn’t centrally placed. Little things like the central placing of vases created a sense of symmetry, perfection. Overall design. He would recentre it. Another centimetre to the left. You can make an imperfect dive seem perfect if you focus on position and posture. Posture at the edge of the tower. Hips forward. A straight lower back. Posture as you’re about to leave the board, as all the energy in your dive is applied. Posture as you tuck: show the judges just one leg, knee close to shoulder and heel close to body. From overhead it would be clear that the tuck was split. A judge up high would see that your knees were apart. There was no judge up high. The judges always sat side-on. Fuck. He was not feeling well.

He needed to stand up. The Grand’s staircase appeared curiously soggy. He tried to make sense of the grandfather clock on the landing, but grandfather clock sounded like the wrong name for what the grandfather clock was. This was stupid. He got up.

A bolt of pain in his chest. His first thought was the Wo of Wow. His tongue in the roof of his mouth. The carpet. He fell. He was on his back staring up at the ceiling.

Sandra the Maid nearby. He wanted to signal to her. There was no power left in his body. What was this? Pain insisted on its pre-eminence. Everything else was play. Footsteps. Her upside-down mouth. Hideously it opened. The new bitter clove of pain in his chest started to expand and to involve his shoulders and his soul. All in all, this was far from ideal. Sandra was running down the stairs shouting, ‘Someone!’

Others. People flocking. The next ten minutes seemed to happen underwater. A busy green blur coming through the crowd. A paramedic ripping open his shirt, sending a button spinning.

‘How old are you?’

‘Forty-five.’

His shirt open. They tilted his head. The carpet rough and warm under his ear. On days when he might be required to help out behind the bar he kept the belt buckled slightly to the side, so the metal wouldn’t scratch the joinery while he was serving. Save the wood. Avoid that grating sound. They undid his belt buckle and loosened his trousers; a friendly comment about his boxers. They were comedy boxers, strawberries in sunglasses designed to be amusing, but he had given no one permission to see them or speak of them. The pain was cooling, was it? Thinning. He was just so tired. Something very cold or very hot against his hip. A metal canister. A tube. At the end of it a mask. They strapped it to his face. It seemed like a toy, the elastic so thin, and that brought fresh hope that this was all a strange game.

‘Breathe,’ they said.

He thought he heard Freya’s voice, someone trying to fob her off, and he wanted to explain that she was smarter than all of them put together, that if anyone could help him it was her.

‘How old are you?’ the paramedic said. Kindness. Hair. A big blurry nose into which all her other features fell. He adored her for speaking so softly.

‘Forty-five,’ he tried to say, but the number was muffled by the mask. He said it again and the pain in his veins was amazing. Everyone standing around looked huge. He was scared of all the ways they might hurt him.

Lying here undressed in the hotel with five or six people managing his movements, every illusion of power and privacy vanished. He was a dust mote among them. A zero, a speck. They made comments he couldn’t respond to. They moved the canister and it knocked his knee.

Tongue-tied. He never knew what the phrase meant until now. All bets were off. All hands to the pump. Took the clichés right out of my mouth.

‘How old are you?’

Four, five.

‘We need to know that you know.’

His eyes started to close. Shut out the world. Thin dreams through which his father’s voice rippled along with his Uncle John’s. A little to-and-fro joke the two of them liked to do in their unexplained mock-American accents.

What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy, Tom?

I don’t know, John, and I sure as hell don’t care.

Someone slapped his face. He heard a voice much like his own mumbling the word ‘Promotion’.

‘What did he say?’ they said.

The pretty paramedic asked what he’d had for breakfast. Did she mean his first breakfast or his second? She asked him who the Prime Minister was. Margaret Thatcher! She’s coming to stay! She asked him what year it was. ’84! ’84! She asked if he had any pets. No. She said she owned a small brown dog. Her dog was called Potato.