Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Gymnastics made him feel whole in a way that all the other sports he was pursuing didn’t. It tightened his arms and back, gripped his stomach muscles. In mid-air every part of him felt hard. He was something cleverly put together, complete. His coach told him to start swimming twice a week as a way to improve core strength.

One winter’s morning when he was nineteen and still living at home, deciding what to do with the rest of his life, or deciding at what point he had better decide it, he took a bus to a pool a few miles away with the intention of swimming his usual lengths. When he got there, he was told he’d have to wait until eleven. The pool was being used by the Brighton & Hove High Dive Club. From a cafe on the second floor of the leisure centre building he watched the training down below. A man in suffocating swimming trunks teetered on the edge of an absurdly high platform. He flipped himself into the air and twisted and flipped again. The certainty of the process. The fearlessness. Gymnastics with higher stakes. Masculinity and daring. The adoring glances of girls.

Only one swimsuited witness seemed immune to the exhilaration. She was sitting on a fold-out chair by the pool’s edge. The tiled floor around her was splodged with coloured towels. She had her arms crossed, her legs crossed, and her skin from this distance looked cold but lively, shimmering, a source of cool light, all but a few dark hairs tucked under a rubber cap. She had a graceful nose, long shins. A few years older than him? The training session seemed to be wrapping up. Time to hurry downstairs.

Her toenails were painted green. She took a pair of glasses from on top of a towel. Wearing these massive black frames, and still also wearing her swimming cap, she looked like some kind of exotic insect, or a librarian from the future. This was Viv, his eventual wife. She had no head for heights, she’d later say. She was only there to support a boyfriend. Didn’t seem at all fussed that the cap and glasses made her look uncool. Therefore, clearly, she was cool. She was the coolest person he’d seen. Lack of self-awareness had its own perfect appeal.

Those downturned lips, though. The unmoving mouth. He didn’t consider back then that a sullen look might be the sign of a sullen person, or that she might be a person whose defining characteristic was sullenness, or that this alluring young woman’s inner tonnage of glum might be sufficient to send her sinking, throughout her twenties and thirties, into hot black holes of depression. Or — here was an idea — he did consider all this. It was exactly what drew him to her.

He stopped staring. Located a man in a tracksuit who was issuing directions. Said to him: teach me how to do this. Thought to himself: forget the gymnastics, forget the football, forget the possible trial for Surrey CC. Probably he was realising, at this time, that he wasn’t getting significantly better at these sports. He’d improved at a faster rate than his peers but had then begun to plateau. He was living in a town where he was once revered, and was now well liked, and where he feared he would soon be simply recognised. He needed a new challenge.

The decision not to go to university. It took a while to begin to regret it, and to feel bitter about his parents discouraging him. Having not been to university themselves — having known no one except Fancy Harry who had — they were suspicious of what three years of no income might achieve. They pushed him to accept an offer of a teaching job at Varndean. Headmaster Perkins had included within this offer — Maths for the younger pupils, Physical Education for the seniors — a harrowingly sensible-sounding line: ‘It’s always prudent to have a fall-back plan.’ No mention was made of the risk factor inherent in this philosophy. A person with a fall-back plan is actually pretty likely to fall back on it.

Years later, a scrapbook in one of his mother’s cupboards. It was with a smile that he located the article he remembered so well from his youth, the one with the headline ‘BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN’. But looking at it now, wrinkled and yellowed, he saw that there was a question mark after the ‘SEEN’. And how had he missed it, this question mark? What sort of mind failed to spot the rising intonation, the air of qualification, the tentativeness of the whole headline? A punctuation mark, you told yourself. Just a way to end a sentence.

When he looked at the journalist’s name it was Daniel Rhoden, a family friend. The only quoted expert was his cousin Billy, a Varndean alumnus who came back to coach hockey each Easter term. Billy whose desire to make a pleasing impression was such that he shaved twice a day until he died at thirty-nine, knocked off his bicycle in some little-visited part of Kent. The experience of seeing this article, of pitting remembered reality against its frozen proof, was a slow electric shock for Moose. The jitters kept going for months.

There are times when your own childhood has the gimcrack feel of a tale told to friends over ale. When it feels like a bar in an old hotel, no television playing, no radio playing, a space that exists outside of events. Crouching before that dusty cupboard, looking at that scrapbook, he wanted desperately to know which page of the Argus the article had been printed on, and what the other pieces in the newspaper that day might have had to say, but the information he needed had been trimmed away. Context had gone in the kitchen bin.

INSIDE THE ROYAL Sussex the floor was fiercely mopped. A smell of disinfectant rose up around her. She was back in Ward 3 but couldn’t see him. Possibly he’d been moved into a private room? The nurse over there would know, but she was busy being screamed at by a guy in a pinstriped jacket. As the man’s face became a plum that ripened and promised to rot the nurse stood there nodding, smiling, head inclined to the side, as if researching an essay on rage.

When the man was out of energy Freya approached the nurse. She was taken to a room that was white and lacking in clutter, a massive improvement on the ward. Everything had a clean, tense neatness — the symmetry of the stacked-up magazines, the flowers sprouting stiffly from their vase, the untouched tissues in their perfect yellow box. By far the worst-looking thing was her father. His skin was as bloodless as his last cigarette and one apparent side effect of the heart attack, unmentioned in the Coldean Library’s medical books, was how it worsened a person’s snoring. She listened in appalled amazement as a ten-second impression of a hay-fever-suffering pug segued into the slow sound of two wounded warthogs making love. She popped a fresh piece of Hubba in her mouth, wished she’d brought her Walkman and her Whitney Houston tapes, and at that moment, a bit shaky, needing sugar, feeling warm, thinking there must at least be a Coke machine somewhere — the NHS should surely invest in machines — she swivelled on her heel and saw, too late, a guy skidding around a corner wall with white coat-tails flapping in his wake. His brown eyes came to a halt an inch or two from her face. She thought of maple syrup.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I was just checking on the patient. Thought I might have heard a cry for help.’

‘That’s just his snoring, I think.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

The doctor — was he old enough to be a proper doctor? — tilted his head to listen. ‘And you would be …’

‘Daughter.’

He took a step back. His face was stubbly and sun-kissed, shaped by flattering shadows. ‘Pleased to meet you then,’ he said. ‘I’m Dr Haswell.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

Haswell. She was impressed. It rang so rhythmically on the ear, was agreeable and grateful in equal measure, sounded wholesome and hopeful. Finch, by contrast, suffered from its extreme brevity and associations with seed-eating. For a long while she’d had a feeling that, in some distant language, her surname meant vomit or saucepan.