Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘Freya Finch,’ he said in a squeaky voice. ‘This is Barry from school.’

‘Hi, Barry,’ she said.

Would she like to go for a swim tomorrow?

‘No, Barry. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is arriving.’

‘The United Kingdom,’ Barry squeaked. ‘Does that include Worthing?’

She told him that it did.

‘I love what she does with her hair!’

They met early again. She searched her purse for 10p coins. Even now the smell of chlorine made her nervous, a full-body anticipation of some oncoming competition.

When she arrived poolside in her swimming costume she found, as always, that John had already started his lengths. His muscular back. His swiftness and ease. She slipped into the pool and swam behind him for a while, struggling to judge distances, to keep close but not too close. After twelve lengths they paused at the deep end, breathing.

‘Everything all right?’ she said.

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘You just seem a bit whatever today.’

Possibly this wasn’t true. Possibly she was making it true by saying it.

‘It’s part of your over-thinking, Freya Finch.’

He explained that they’d talked about this problem before. His eyes moved briefly to a pretty girl with short red hair. At some point in the last two weeks, without ever really acknowledging that she was doing it, she’d learned to follow John’s stares, to look at the girls he looked at. She wanted the women he wanted, or rather to be the women he wanted, ideally while being herself.

‘Not preoccupied, then?’ she said.

He was looking only at droplets on the tiles. Smoothly he leaned in and kissed her. ‘You look fit today,’ he said.

She hated the tone in which he’d delivered these words. She let the silence shrink her discomfort down. Her fingers hurt from clinging to the edge and she said, ‘A holiday, maybe.’

‘What?’

‘We could go.’

‘Come on. I wish. Where are we going to get the cash, Freya Finch? I owe my parents …’ He shook his head, blinked, a confusion of calculations. ‘ Money ,’ he said.

Various awkward observations passed between them. Eventually she said, ‘That old guy over there. His bald patch — it’s the exact shape of Africa.’

John smiled a fake smile. The eyes didn’t light up at all. ‘That one over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘He’s really tired.’

She stared at him.

‘What? Isn’t that the game?’

The space between words was unswimmable. Her stomach was jumpy. Her guts were a string of Christmas lights fizzling out one by one, and the image wasn’t even seasonal.

He turned away and carried on swimming.

In her previous life she’d thought the worst thing in the world was to sound needy. Let a note of desperation enter your voice when you’re with a boy? Unthinkable. But now neediness seemed like a condition rather than a decision. Needy? Yes, I’m needy! Give me needy drugs. Relieve my neediness! She was in need and he was being a dick. Or she was being a dick. Both, probably, which was worse — the kind of equality you didn’t want.

After more lengths she swam up to him and said, ‘If you don’t want to see me again, that’s fine.’ Hated the tremble her voice held. Hated that the words had gone wavy in her throat. Why had she even said it?

A pause. A pause! She wanted to die. To call someone’s bluff and then discover they weren’t bluffing — was there anything worse in the world? She was succumbing to an absurd sinking feeling, a sense that everything with a beginning had an ending.

‘Look,’ John said, ‘I wasn’t, probably, totally straight with you the other day.’

‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I was being stupid. Let’s swim.’

‘Frey.’

‘Don’t call me Frey. You always call me Freya Finch. It’s funny.’

‘It’s about Sasha,’ he said. ‘The truth is I really like you, and stuff, but this thing with —’

‘How about I show you a dive?’

‘What? Look, Freya, the point —’

‘The point is I’m going to try the ten-metre board. Have fun.’ She was out of the water and walking.

Self-consciousness came. It always did. One of the pleasures of being in the water was that you never thought about how you looked. The pool swallowed you up, insecurities and all. Your little-girl body took on a mature purity, your mind developed a sense of direction. The liquid connected you to everyone else. You knew exactly what you had to do. More speed. Less splash. Focus on the legs. Walking along the edge of the pool, the corrugated tiles that stopped you slipping, you felt none of this joy. You were close but you just couldn’t reach it. There was a new heaviness in her legs. The water at her side, the elusive warmth of it, the impression of the whole safe thing.

She sensed her swimsuit was clinging to her bottom in embarrassing ways. She tucked a finger under the elastic rim. Sasha. Sasha. Think of the more important things. Like her father — he really was getting better, wasn’t he? Like the doctors would look out for him. Like Anthony Haswell. Like Mr Marshall. They knew about hearts. Good! Someone should know about hearts! ‘A lot of heart attacks are vicious but not malicious.’ This is what Dr Haswell had said last week. Vicious but not malicious. Freya had tried to picture this combination of traits. All she’d managed to come up with was Abby Stephens from sixth form, cuttingly witty but fond of baking birthday flapjacks.

Fuck. He was fucking Sasha. It was so desperately predictable. It was the clichés that hurt the most. She’d always hated greeting cards with text printed inside, stock condolences or congratulations that preceded the event they addressed. Now whoever wrote those was writing her.

Anyone who cared to look up now as she climbed the metal ladder would see how her hips, in the tight black nylon suit, looked narrow as a fourteen-year-old girl’s. Until recently this was a good thing, but these days you wanted to be Dara Torres or one of the even curvier swimmers. It was so hard to keep yourself pretty because prettiness was always changing, always shifting, which was what her mother had once said about truth — that a true thing in 1974 could be a false thing ten years later, and then true again when a new decade came. ‘Things change, Freya, I’m sorry.’ A way of saying ‘sorry’ that drained away every drop of authenticity.

Probably John was comparing her goosebumps to the lovely constellation of water crystals on the nut-brown back of the girl in front. Three rungs higher, bum swaying smoothly, the girl’s dark hair hung down the line of her spine and from behind she was so pretty, so perfect, that you wanted to reach up in one seamless motion and wring out her hair like a soaked rope just to touch her, be part of her, to connect with something pristine and confident and sustained so fully by itself. The ladder’s bars were cold and her feet were squeaking on the steps and why was she heading up here anyway?

Diving like Moose taught her to do. But that wasn’t from a ten-metre platform. And would he be OK? And had she ever even liked John, really? Wasn’t she just distracting herself? That hurt all the more, though. The idea she’d only been playing at happiness, a stupid little-girl game.

She’d heard from someone who knew someone who knew someone that Sarah had found out about the thing she’d done ages ago with the trainee teacher on the golf course, which wasn’t even a thing anyway because he couldn’t keep it up, and it was ages ago now, back when she was a different person. Supposedly they were annoyed, Sarah and Co. were annoyed, annoyed at the fact she hadn’t told them direct, or else they thought that she was easy, which was crazy because she’d only properly slept with two people ever and they’d slept with loads, and that’s why they hadn’t phoned, and thinking about all of this made her nauseous. Sarah and Tracy weren’t nice people. The knowledge cut through her: they were not nice. And yet they were her friends, weren’t they, so that was evidence that she wasn’t nice either. What else could you draw from the facts? Why else did John not want her? Why, when it was finally all working well, did they look you in the eye and dismiss you? Why was she letting herself be dismissed? Why did she care?