She eats breakfast cereal in bed. Not just every now and then when she’s feeling poorly or having a bit of an off day. She eats breakfast cereal in bed pretty much every day. And not just for breakfast. She eats it for dinner too. Or ready-made sandwiches or packets of crisps or those little boxes of raisins that kids have in their packed lunches. She watches the news on her flat-screen TV while she munches her way through crunchy nut cornflakes every morning; she has fruit for lunch on the hoof while she’s working and she has a bowl or two of cereal or maybe an egg mayonnaise sandwich for dinner. And if she has nothing much planned in the evening she’ll just put on her pyjamas, grab the remote and flick through the channels until she finds something she wants to watch while she chomps on a bowl of Rice Krispies and talks at the TV, gesticulating with her spoon.
He met her at the all-night garage at two in the morning. He was just on his way back from somewhere, putting fuel in the car for the morning. She had just nipped in for some milk. “A funny time for breakfast,” He’d quipped while they waited for the guy behind the counter to change the till roll. “Any time’s a good time for breakfast”, she said and He took that as an invitation and before she knew it she was inviting Him over for breakfast the following evening and He was certain that He’d turn up to a full on feast of bacon and eggs with whatever he fancied from the bedroom menu for dessert. But she doesn’t cook. She might oblige with whatever else He wants, but she never, ever cooks.
When He got to her swanky apartment He couldn’t quite believe it. He couldn’t stop Himself from tidying the odd pile of papers here and a few stray books there. She was irritated by Him but she let it go. She offered Him a glass of wine and He followed her into the kitchen where she had to wash a wine glass from the collection of dirty glasses sitting by the sink waiting to be cleaned. And while she ran it under the hot water tap He opened the fridge to get the wine and let out an audible gasp. All that was in there was the wine, a bottle of milk and a week’s worth of pre-packaged sandwiches.
“Have you just got back from a trip?” He asked.
“No”, she said. She just handed Him the glass, which was cleaner now, but if He was in a restaurant He’d still ask for another one. But He took it and let her fill it up and didn’t ask any more questions.
If she could be bothered to explain she would tell Him that she used to cook, once upon a time. In fact she was a great cook. She loved it. She’d cook pancakes for breakfast and bake pies and make her own pasta, kneading it and wringing it through the pasta machine until her arms ached and the workbench was covered with strand after strand of perfect linguine. She made cakes too, lots of cakes, and flans and pastries and trifles and home-made ice cream. She set the table for every meal with a cloth (freshly ironed) and place mats and coasters, and she tidied the kitchen as she went along and cleared up after every meal. She kept the house spotless, got the vacuum cleaner out every day and moved the sofa so that she could clean under it and behind it. And once a week she got down on her hands and knees and wiped every skirting board with a damp cloth.
That was her alter ego when she was married, years before. And she didn’t do it because her husband expected her to, she did it because she expected him to want her to. But all that baking made her fat and all that cleaning gave her dishpan hands and a lingering smell of bleach. He didn’t like it and he didn’t like her. And he told her so, just before he ran off to start a new life in the South of France with her best friend, the skinny one who couldn’t so much as boil an egg but loved to shag alfresco on sunny afternoons.
Understandably, she was upset when he left and spent a couple of weeks in bed consoling herself with family-sized packs of Maltesers and cheese-and-onion crisps (her husband had never liked the smell of those either). But after her hibernation she discovered that she missed the friend more than the husband. She wasn’t that bothered about the husband at all. All that domestic goddess stuff was just a distraction from the fact that she couldn’t really give a shit about him, so she made a decision: she just wasn’t going to do that stuff any more. So she gave up cooking and she gave up cleaning and she gave up worrying what anyone thought of her. So when He grimaced at the sight of stray Sugar Puffs in the bed, she just grimaced back at Him.
He fucked her anyway. But He never went back.
18
There are hardly any pictures of me as a child and in all the photos I’ve ever seen I have a dirty face. Back in the days when you had to pay for the film and for the processing whether your pictures were any good or not, people used to wait for the ‘Kodak moment’ before they bothered getting the camera out. Apparently most of my Kodak moments involved eating chocolate or ice cream or licking the bowl after we’d been baking. In those pictures I’m proud of my dirty face and you can almost hear me yelling ‘CHEEEEESE’ from the grainy old print. I would like to be that girl again. That girl who is caught in the act of being totally oblivious to social conventions like clean faces and table manners. That girl who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
But that’s not allowed when you’re a grown-up. Certainly not in my house. So when I get home I say nothing about laughing with Mandy, or the vanilla slice, or the phone call from Julie. I just ask Him does He want a cup of tea and He says, “Ooh, please, I’m gasping.” And I stand by the kettle waiting for it to boil, putting teabags into cups and getting the milk out ready, thinking about how I’m going to squeeze in a quick drink with Julie and get back here at the usual time without Him knowing.
I hand Him his cup of tea and He asks me what’s for dinner.
“Chilli con carne.”
It was going to be lasagne but there’s only one piece of lasagne in the packet so I had to do a quick re-think. Thank goodness for the versatility of minced beef; He hates it when I have to nip to the shop for an ingredient we’ve run out of before I can cook. Thank goodness I checked the cupboard before I brought the teas through.
I wait for Him to ask me how it went at work but he’s just flicking through what’s on TV tonight with the remote, waiting for me to ask Him the same thing.
“How was work?” I say.
And as though He hasn’t heard me He carries on searching through the schedule for something He might want to watch later and I find myself sucked into the screen too, trying to read fast enough before He presses the button again and I’m cut off mid sentence.
Eventually He presses the button one more time and the screen goes black and He looks up at me.
“Work was fine,” He says. “OK. Well, as OK as it ever is. You know.”
And then He launches into a story about that fucker from accounts and how he’s got everyone’s back up and how they’re thinking of going to the boss now to complain about him because it’s bordering on harassment and something needs to be done.
I nod and gasp in all the right places and He cheers up just for getting it off his chest.
“Anyway,” He says. “How was work for you? First day back and all that. Was it OK?”
I tell Him about the awkwardness when I first arrived and about the flowers and how nice everyone was.
“Great,” He says. “So back to normal then.”
“Back to normal,” I repeat.
“So are you going swimming tonight then?” He says.
“Yes,” I say, feeling like He knows I’m planning to meet up with Julie even though He can’t know.
“Great,” He says, “Cos I think I’ll go out. There’s nothing on the telly and Mike’s trying to get a team together for a pub quiz.”
“Oh. OK. Do you want me to come down and join you after swimming?” I don’t know why I ask the question, I know He’ll say no and I don’t even want Him to say yes.
“No,” He says, “You’ll be knackered after swimming and quizzes are not really your thing are they?”
Then, just so that I can’t reply to his rhetorical question, He gets up from the chair, a
nnounces He needs the loo and dashes off upstairs yelling “How long ‘til dinner? I’m starving!”
“About half an hour,” I yell back and get out my phone to text Julie the good news.
***
I feel stupidly nervous when I get to the swimming baths. It’s not that long since I was last there but I feel like everyone will be looking at me and wondering why I’ve been away. Maybe they’ve even been talking about it over the past couple of weeks, maybe I should have a story ready in case anyone asks. They won’t ask. We never do more than nod at each other. Why should they ask?
The guy at the reception kiosk is new, new to me anyway. He’s good-looking in a sporty kind of way and he’s much less miserable than the woman who‘s usually on the front desk. He even says please when he asks me for the money and smiles as he gives me the change. You stay away for a couple of weeks and suddenly the place goes all friendly and polite.
But poolside everything is reassuringly the same. Same old faces in the pool. Same po-faced lifeguard counting down the minutes until he finishes his shift and texting his mates while he’s supposed to be poised ready to save a drowning pensioner at any minute. Same old dodgy smell coming from the gents’ toilet, same creaky doors on the changing rooms with the same illegible graffiti. It’s one of those old-fashioned municipal pools with the changing rooms down the side and the pool in the middle. No lockers, no wheelchair access, no fancy Jacuzzi, just a big, echoey room with massive, round lights, like flying saucers, hanging from the ceiling.
I take out my swimming costume. It has been folded in the bottom of this bag since I washed it after my last swim nearly four weeks ago. I think about my baby and how the swimming costume would have stretched to cover my bump. But I’m not going to cry, I’m just going to swim. So I put it on and I sling my towel over the door so that I can see which changing room is mine, then step out of my cubicle and take a look at who’s in the pool. The bald guy with the dodgy leg is there, and skinny goggles girl and the old tattooed woman, and there’s one or two semi-regulars who I’ve seen here before but not every week.
The bald, dodgy-leg guy nods at me as I walk down the stone steps into the pool, then he launches himself off again as I shiver. There’s a funny kind of noisy quiet, with just the exaggerated sound of splashing echoing through the room, and the odd cough and the sound of my brain banging around inside my head. But as I finally throw myself forwards into the water and start swimming, the quiet suddenly explodes into the sound of loud voices and laughing as a group of teenage boys burst into the room and the door handle slams against the wall and everyone in the pool stares to see where the racket is coming from.
We don’t usually get teenagers in: there’s no water slide, not even a diving board, and the average age must be at least fifty, so it’s not exactly in the teenage hotspot top ten. But I’m glad that I’m not exiled with the pensioners and the oddballs for a change and, anyway, they stop being quite so loud when everyone stares at them.
It doesn’t last though. When the first one comes out of his changing room, he just jumps in and starts swimming. The second one finishes getting changed and jumps in, swims up behind him and grabs him by the ankle and drags him under. So he comes up yelling and pushes his friend under, just as the third one arrives to join in the mutual ducking. By the time all five of them are in the pool it’s all noise and splashing. Then they start jumping in, then they start pushing each other in and everyone who was already in the pool when they arrived is squeezed into about a third of the space down at one end and skinny goggles girl gets out and gets changed without even having a shower.
And all the time, the attendant just watches them as though by the power of staring alone he can stop them from behaving like thugs and restore peace to the pool. I keep thinking, ‘in a minute he will go and tell them’. ‘In a minute he’ll do something.’ But he just lets them carry on pushing each other in and jumping on each other’s heads and making ridiculous amounts of noise.
A guy in a suit comes in, a manager I think. He’s obviously heard the noise and wonders what’s going on. So he and the pool attendant have a tête-à-tête and then they both stand and stare at the kids in the pool, while the adults in the pool stare at them and wait for them to do something and the hooligans completely ignore everyone. And when the power of staring doesn’t work, they clearly don’t have a plan B because they do nothing. And since I can’t swim because half the pool’s a war zone, I just get out, collect my shampoo from my cubicle and head for the shower.
So I’m standing in the shower, washing my hair and watching what’s going on. And the old bald fella with the leg comes and stands in the showers next to me. I’ve never seen him get out of the pool before. He’s always in the water when I arrive and still in the water when I leave, but today he’s got out and for the first time ever in his life this guy that I see every week, pretty much, actually opens his mouth to speak to me.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that,” he says. “It’s dangerous, don’t you think? It’s dangerous.”
I mumble my agreement through a haze of shampoo suds but, even though I do genuinely agree with him and think it’s ridiculous that they can carry on like that with no-one stopping them, the first thought that jumps into my head when the old fella stands next to me in the shower is: ‘I wonder if I can see what’s wrong with his leg?’ So I reach down for my conditioner so that I can look at his leg without making it obvious that I’m looking at his leg. But it seems normal. No shark bite. No hideous wasting disease.
“Don’t you think, love?”
He’s still talking to me and I have no idea what he said because I was too busy thinking about his gammy leg.
“Yes,” I say. “Someone should say something.”
“But they’re not going to, are they?” Gammy-leg Man says, nodding towards the pool attendant and the man in the suit, who are still watching the boys pushing each other into the water.
“No,” I answer, “and telepathy’s not going to do it, is it?” and he gives me one of those hospital smiles.
He’s hoping I’m going to do something. He’s waiting for me to do something and it occurs to me that I actually could.
I flip my shampoo bottle closed purposefully. “Somebody should say something,” I say again to Gammy-leg Man and with my shampoo bottle in one hand and my conditioner in the other I march towards the pool attendant and his useless sidekick.
“Yes love,” says the one in the suit. He’s too warm in his suit and his collar is too tight and his belt has been pulled in too far so that his fat belly flobbles over the top of it. He’s sweating. He’s wondering what I’m going to say. I’m wondering what I’m going to say.
“Don’t you think you should be stopping them from doing that?” I say.
“Our health and safety guidelines advise us not to put members of staff at risk,” he says and he can’t even look at me while he’s saying it because he knows it’s the lamest excuse anyone has ever uttered.
“Oh,” I say. I can feel the eyes of every swimming pool regular in the place looking at me and waiting for me to sock it to him. “And what do your health and safety guidelines have to say about the health and safety of your customers?” I pause to give him chance to answer but he’s not got anything to say. “Do they say anything about protecting them from yobs while they’re on the premises? Do they tell you that you’d be liable for any injuries incurred on your premises if you haven’t done everything you can to prevent them?”
The sinewy pool attendant in the stupid baggy shorts thinks he might interrupt me but I’m on a roll.
“Perhaps you don’t think they pose any danger to anyone? Perhaps you think they’re just a bit of a nuisance and it’s not your job to sort it out? It is your job though, isn’t it? Or, let’s put it this way, it certainly isn’t our job. Surely you have rules about behaviour in the pool and surely they’ve overstepped
the mark, so it’s your job to chuck them out, or at least have a word and ask them to behave? Isn’t it?”
I give him a proper chance to answer this time and realise that the pool has gone spookily quiet. Even the thugs have stopped pushing each other in long enough to eavesdrop and suddenly I feel like I should have left it to someone else to speak up, or at least got dressed before I started going all superhero citizen.
“They seem to have stopped now, anyway,” the sweaty suit man says, lamely.
I turn round to look at the yobs and they give me a round of applause.
“Are you OK love?” says the old tattooed woman behind me.
“Thanks,” I say, “I’m fine.”
“Thank you,” she says. “It’s not her job to sort out their behaviour,” she says to the pool attendant and the sweaty suit man, “is it?”
And then she speaks to the gang of lads across the pool. “No-one wants to stop you having fun, lads, just spare a thought for those of us who want to chug along quietly and do a few lengths, will you?”
One of them gives her a double thumbs up while another says, “Sorry ladies,” and that’s that.
“It wasn’t that difficult was it?” she says to Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.
They don’t reply.
“Sorry for losing my rag,” I say to them.
“Don’t you apologise, love,” says Tattooed Woman. “Just you get yourself changed.”
So I do as I’m told and the quiet yobs are still watching me and Gammy-leg Man nods and smiles at me from the shower.
As I get changed I keep replaying what I said and what I could have said and I find myself grinning and I can’t stop. I didn’t really stop the boys from behaving like hooligans and I didn’t deliver the killer blow to the pool attendant and his sweaty sidekick, but the hooligan taming and the Tattooed Lady’s outburst wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for me.
Look at me, I’m an actual grown-up. Frame me and put me on the wall.
The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING Page 11
