Jonathan Lee - High Dive

The coffin was made from the wood of Aberdeenshire larches. Very durable. No chemicals. No polish and no stain. No screws, either; only old oak dowels. Cost him all the savings he had.

The idea a life could be boxed up into neat, discrete phrases. Probably it was bollocks. There were times before his father’s death when he ate doughnuts for breakfast and curry for dinner and caught colds and didn’t exercise for two days or three. There were times after his father’s death when he went on long runs and went to the gym and ate expensive muesli in the mornings. The diving didn’t stop straight away. He kept going. Years passed. He switched into and out of coaching. But something changed that day he saw his father dead on the floor. A turning point occurred.

Looking back, Moose’s twenties and thirties felt fast and thin, somehow sketched in, important moments resisting depth. Whole years had the quick-scrawl quality of the notes Viv left on the fridge.

He and Viv tried for a child. There were miscarriages. Grieving for these lost children briefly brought them together, did it? Made them feel well suited, almost, to the marriage they’d rushed into. Then they got lucky, and he immediately thought, Fuck, what have I done? With the arrival of Baby Freya, his life widened out into the blur of family life. He began to eat a lot of chocolate. Got back in touch with Wally. Started helping him with coaching on Saturday mornings.

Fatherhood: the expense of it horrified him. More and more concierge work, saving up tips; he could do it in the evenings when Viv was at home looking after Freya. Less and less tutoring of little Cuthberts and Anthonys. Sunday afternoons travelling to his mother in Brighton.

At some point he and Viv stopped sleeping in the same bed (his snoring was the first excuse to surface) and at another point he became unsure whether women of his acquaintance expected a single-cheek kiss or a double-cheek kiss. He compromised by providing a friendly pre-emptive hug.

Vivienne began to go to a lot of academic conferences abroad. He became, for a while, the main carer at home. He felt like a single parent long before he was a single parent. He suspected her of infidelities. There were silent phone calls. There were receipts for dinners for two. There were coloured envelopes addressed to her in a small even script. But he didn’t want to be the kind of guy who suspects his wife of infidelity, who shouts down phones and opens another’s correspondence, so instead of confronting her about the potential affairs he tried to sleep with the babysitter.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you touching my face?’

‘You’re beautiful.’

‘Mr Finch, I’m repulsed by what you’re trying to do right now.’

Repulsed. He felt sure Chloë, twenty-one and tanned, hadn’t meant to use such an unforgiving word, or indeed to tell Vivienne what had happened.

What else from these years? TV became a close friend. News of the Colour Strike, the postal workers’ strike, the miners’ strike, the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike. Freya was quiet when images were on-screen. ‘UK needs a stronger leader, Phil.’ This from his Uncle Mick.

Then one day, in the newspaper, a gift. Next to an article claiming that Britain’s economy had slipped remorselessly down the international league table, he saw an advert. Diving instructor — head coach — at an American university. A chance to do what he enjoyed in a place where no one knew him. An opportunity to experience the life of higher education that should have been his first time round.

His purpose would be to nurture young talent. It would be like maths tutoring, except there would be no more sedentary processing of textbooks, no more passed notes, no more rooms that smelt of farts, creativity exercised only in the labyrinthine daily excuses for unfinished homework. It would be like concierge work, except he’d get in shape again, and there wouldn’t be such a need to be servile. There would be no more London, with its gloomy summers and endless protests and its winter of discontent — a winter that seemed to have expanded to accommodate many more months than a season reasonably should.

He cut the advert out. Put it on the kitchen pinboard. The idea of flight made him feverish.

Morningside Heights, Manhattan.

32 acres of land.

State-of-the-art facilities.

Probably he should always have worked on becoming a great coach rather than a great sportsman. His attempts to break out on his own as an athlete were supposed to have allowed him to get closer to living an authentic life, closer to that thing everyone agrees is to be desired above all else, which is freedom. Instead, the endless striving for independence had worn him out and made him hanker after everyone else’s homogenous middle-class dreams: more security, more money, a better kind of car.

He got the job at Columbia on Wally’s recommendation. Wally was a guy who always knew a guy who knew a guy. Being offered it convinced him that this was Fate. He had been selected, rewarded. The world had approved his plan. He told Vivienne it was a great opportunity for them both. Told her it would be good for Freya too.

But oh, the things Viv hated out there. The summer humidity, the graffiti on the subways, the way it turned out that subsidised campus apartments were only for the academic staff on tenure-track. The Dean’s secretary was very sorry if Moose had received the wrong information. Story of my life.

Eleven months into their time overseas, his marriage crumbled under the accumulated weight of her daily complaints and his technique (masterfully executed, he’d thought) of pretending everything was fine. She said that every time she rang the number you needed to ring to get a Social Security card, they asked her to state her Social Security number. She said that when she went into the bakery for a blueberry muffin, they pretended not to understand her. Tiny shifts of emphasis. Language — the thing she cared about most — conspiring to make her misunderstood. She couldn’t get an academic position anywhere. Hadn’t published papers here. Said he’d stripped her of her self-respect by moving the family out of England.

But she also kissed him sometimes and said ‘I love you’ sometimes and sometimes — once — they went on an amazing trip upstate, and he felt again that she was the love of his life, so it still hurt badly, very badly, when she said she was sleeping with a guy called Bob.

This was how he remembered it. She was on the sofa in their small Manhattan apartment. She seemed to find her own admission of infidelity amusing. He saw that on the carpet beside the sofa, under her limp right hand, there was a half-empty bottle of gin. Half-full, he thought, but he couldn’t change his mind. It was a half-empty bottle of gin.

He thought of the time he’d spent six weeks on the sofa after his father died, eating food from foil takeaway trays. The time he’d screamed at Vivienne that life was not right not right not right. The time he’d somersaulted off the board too close, way too close, daring it to clip his head, to make him bleed, to change his situation in some small or major way.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. She’d felt ignored for years, she said. She was married to a man who preferred to spend all his time trying to make a living out of falling into water. A man who was content to fall and fall. Falling from three storeys high! Teaching others to fall! They’d never make enough money for Freya from that. ‘You’re a dreamer!’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You are, Moose. Somewhere along the line … somewhere, you mislaid the ambitions you had for yourself. Now you want to claim they were stolen. Yes, you are, you’re a dreamer.’

He blinked and his marriage was gone. She said she was going to make a life out here with Bob. Bob who loved her. Bob who knew her. Bob who understood her. Moose could stay here or move back to England alone. She was sorry. She was. ‘I’m sorry. So much of your life is repetition, Moose. So much of your life …’