Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Sometimes she felt she had no option but to destroy her father. A remark about his widening waistline or the stifling smallness of Brighton. She had no option but to nuke him straight off the map. There was something wrong with her and that was why she was being dumped for Sasha. Who wants to sleep with a stupid mean girl who doesn’t even know how to please a man in bed? She was getting dumped by a guy she should have dumped before he dumped her.

Every muscle was tight. The pads of her hands were wrinkled and soft. Her swimming cap was tight. She would book a flight to Spain tomorrow. She’d heard of an agency who could get you cheap ones at short notice. She had £215 saved up. Screw Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with real life. Margaret Thatcher was a person other people had made up. Her cap felt very tight. She owed Moose £9. She could calculate. John couldn’t calculate. 215 minus 9 is 206. £206 was a fortune. Way too tight. She could go anywhere, surely, on £206?

She was at the top level of the diving tower. The high windows with their rounded tops made her think of churches. Through the few transparent roof panels an open sky was breathing.

A hairy man hurled himself off the board in a cannonball that quickly became a cannonsplodge. She heard the fat smack of a fleshy entry. The air was thick with chlorine. The diving board stuck out and out.

She would be splashless. Serene. Toes lined up. Ten little piggies. A thought about the Conservatives who’d been in the hotel this week and of the word that so perfectly described their old-school outrage — Why hasn’t my taxi arrived? Where are your other cognacs? — which was ‘aghast’. When not amused, be aghast.

And what were hers? Her private rules?

Connect with nothing. Be bored or spiky. Mock or ignore. Take aim at easy targets. Keep a distance, keep a space. Be weak and weak. Go to bed with fuckwits. Be mean to customers. Was this her? Was it? She thought it might be. She was, as her mother had once succinctly said, ‘a perfect little shit’.

The pretty tanned girl did an elegant dive. Now it was her turn. She thought of Samantha, a girl at school, and how Samantha had needed leather-and-metal ankle braces for a while, part of an orthopaedic corrective programme, and how around that time Sarah and Tracy were showing an interest in Freya, including her within their group, maybe impressed by her swimming, maybe noting her slightly improved looks, maybe appreciating her willingness to help with their homework — do it for them, basically. And Sarah and Tracy talked about Samantha’s spasticity. They said that if Freya wanted to hang around with them they needed to know if she was really actual friends with Spaz Sam.

A chance to advance and be accepted. Never spoke to Samantha again.

It was the things you chose not to look at, the pieces unexamined, that survived as boiled-down sensations, stomach pains, squirming memories that made you ashamed in the night.

Balance and height. Toes together. Do not baulk.

Moose talked about the Tank. Respecting the Tank and remembering there was nothing scary about the Tank. But the word Tank was not helpful. He might as well call it the Abyss or the Grave or the Nuclear Winter. Trying to impress John with a dive! Trying to avoid what he had to say. She turned away from the edge and walked back along the platform, squeezing past a man with huge hands. The man said ‘You OK?’ and she climbed down the ladder, felt broad ground beneath her feet. John was standing by the lifeguard’s chair, waiting, and although he wasn’t watching the tanned girl climbing out of the pool, she felt sure that was where his eyes wanted to be.

After getting showered and dressed Freya went upstairs. She joined him at a table overlooking the pool. The space didn’t deserve to be called a cafe. Everything about it was inconsistent with that uplifting continental word. The troll behind the counter was supervising half a dozen jaundiced cakes lying in an oblong plastic container, sick babies waiting to be rescued from this especially horrible ward, and thin brown coffee was dripping from the tap of a giant chrome cylinder beside the till.

‘Basically,’ he said, ‘I really like you and everything, but I think we’d be better off as friends.’

They could carry on as they were, he said, but he didn’t want to do that in case he hurt her, because he could tell she was a person who had quite a bit of hurt in her already, like issues about her mum or whatever, emotional stuff, and now her dad being sick, even though he was getting better, and he didn’t want to unbalance her further or anything because that would be shitty, wouldn’t it?

MARTY CLARKE WAS speculating loudly as to what kind of sex life Thatcher might enjoy with Denis. It had started with Clinkie Hanson saying Arthur Scargill had her over a barrel — she was beaten now, she’d have to settle on the NUM’s terms — and that had set off a string of dirty puns from Jim Clarke, Marty’s brother, that climaxed in the inevitable one about Big Willie Whitelaw. Dan was leaning forward, weight on his elbows, eyes on the beer-soaked bar mat, trying to block all this out and hear what the radio had to say.

Mrs Thatcher is expected, within the hour, to greet journalists outside —

In advance of tomorrow’s crucial speech at the Conservative Party Conference, the Prime Minister has indic—

As always when Thatcher came up in conversation, anecdotes led back to Clinkie’s year in the Blocks. Clinkie was a man who liked to stay groomed and he claimed now, for the hundredth time, that he’d bangled a little comb to keep his hair tidy inside. Like many of the guys who’d done time, he revelled in prison language. It marked him out as a martyred man. Nothing in the Blocks went by its real name. ‘Bangle’ meant sticking something up your arse to prevent confiscation. A penis was a Fagin. Sinister and droopy-looking, a supposed receiver of stolen goods. If a guy was really good at utilising the spaces in his body — Bobby Sands’s right-hand man being the obvious example — people called him the Suitcase, or the Holdall, or some other variation on luggage.

Sprinkling salt on a bowl of wet-looking chips Clinkie said, ‘They make sure to give you yer statutory requirements. You’re entitled every month to one ounce of the salt and one of sugar. But if a screw was a real shit he’d give it you all at once, so he would. Pour it over your food, the salt and sugar and all, and when he went for his own dinner was when you’d start your secret Irish classes with the lads. You’d take a few bites of your shit-awful meal and come up with all the ways you could call the fella a cunt.’

Marty yawned into his lager. ‘Major bastard, the prison warden. Type a’ guy who belongs behind bars.’

Marty and Clinkie, after laughing a while, slowly eased out of their performances. Their voices softened. They started talking about their kids. Clinkie was divorced. Marty was having marital problems. They sat there, comforting each other, drinking and talking. Smoking.

Down where the bar became the wall, Jim Murray worked his jaw from side to side. It was a nervous thing he’d been doing since June of 1979. ‘I’ll quote you that you said that, Marty. Your kid’s going to be just fine, you’ll see.’

A man Dan didn’t know took a pretend toke on a pretend spliff and pretended to be happy about it. Billy Fitzgerald caught the man’s eye and said, ‘Oh please.’ They disappeared out back and Clinkie chose that moment to start another story. Prison tales weren’t what Dan wanted to hear. They brought thoughts about windowless rooms and all the various routes by which he might end up in one. Did he even want to be in the company of these men? Did he even belong? He wanted to belong. He liked most of these men. He took his drink and his much-mocked book on knotweed and sat at an unoccupied table by the fruit machine.