The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING

by Colette Snowden

  As we walk to the car park Tattoo Woman tells me that Peter the lifeguard is a PhD student researching something to do with speech development in infants and he’s worried about getting his thesis finished because they keep giving him extra shifts at the pool. He’s got debts to pay off, she says, so he takes the work because he can’t afford to turn the money down. I wonder how on earth she’s managed to get so chatty with the lifeguard in the ten minutes it’s taken me to get changed and fill in the incident form. I think how odd it is that everything I know about the person who’s just more or less saved my life (God, that sounds so melodramatic) can be summed up in about two sentences – three at a push if I added in a physical description. Weird.

  It turns out that Tattoo Woman lives only a few streets from me and she swims at the pool three nights a week. She knows my road so I don’t have to give her directions, and she just chats and chats all the way to the house. Perhaps she thinks she’s got to keep me awake by chatting. Perhaps that’s what Peter and the sweaty manager told her to do.

  When we get there I say goodbye and thank you as she pulls up to the kerb but she switches the engine off and tells me she’s coming inside with me.

  “And I’m not taking no for an answer,” she says. “I won’t sleep tonight if I’m not convinced that you’re perfectly all right before I go home.”

  That’s fine. That’s not so bad, but when she marches me through to the living room and insists that I sit down and then goes off into the kitchen to make us both a cup of tea I start to feel a bit manhandled.

  The dog shoots through the kitchen door as soon as she opens it and she lets out a loud ‘fuck me’, then he comes bounding in to see me and jumps onto my lap uninvited. It’s like he knows I need a bit of TLC, I think. Then I have to tell myself not to be so bonkers: he’s just had a strange woman open the kitchen door for him, nearly trip over him and then swear at the top of her voice; he’s come looking for reassurance, not offering it.

  I can hear Tattoo Woman clattering cupboard doors in the kitchen, looking for mugs and teabags and everything. I wonder what I’m going to tell Him if He comes back now. What will He think if He walks in through the back door and finds there’s been a coup in the kitchen?

  She comes back in with tea in a teapot (which I never use, not even when my mum comes over) and a packet of chocolate biscuits that I didn’t even know we had.

  “My mum always said you need something sweet after a shock. I’d rather have a biscuit than sugar in my tea, wouldn’t you?”

  “My mum says you should have a nip of whisky in your tea after a shock,” I answer. And I just want my mum. I wonder if I should phone her. I definitely shouldn’t: the idea of her being here is definitely more comforting than the real thing.

  “Well, if you’ve got some whisky?” Tattoo Woman says, clearly quite keen on the idea of a nip in the tea.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Well, chocolate biscuit it will have to be then,” she says. “I’ll be mother. You just relax.” She pours me a cup of tea and offers me one of my biscuits on my plate and refuses to put the plate down until I’ve had two, then takes two for herself. “No choccie for you!” she says to Chips, leaving him to gaze longingly and fruitlessly at me.

  “How’re you feeling now, love?” she asks me, gesturing at me to eat my chocolate biscuit by pointing at it with her own.”

  “I’m fine.” I say, “I’m fine. I’m honestly fine. Honestly.”

  She doesn’t say anything; she just raises her eyebrows and takes another bite of her biscuit.

  We crunch our biscuits. Chips gives up on getting in on the biscuit action and skulks back into the kitchen for a lie down. I look at the clock on the bookshelf: 9.20, way too early for Him to get back from the pub quiz.

  Tattoo Woman finishes her second biscuit and puts her cup down on the coffee table.

  “The thing is, love. What’s your name again?”

  “Marion.”

  “Marion. The thing is Marion, you’re not fine are you? I mean, tell me to mind my own business if you like. I don’t want to interrogate you or anything, but I know what it’s like to spend the whole time making out to everyone that you’re fine and everything’s all right and you’re clearly not. I mean, in my opinion, I don’t think you seem like someone who’s all right.”

  She waits. She takes another biscuit. I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’ve been caught cheating in an end-of-term spelling test. Any minute now she’s going to tell me that I’ve let myself down and let the whole of the class down and then send me off to see the head.

  “The thing is,” she punctuates her sentences with little flicks of her biscuit in my direction. “The thing is, Marion, that fainting in the swimming pool isn’t nothing: it’s a big fat sign telling you that something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, honestly. I’ve never fainted before in my life. I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. I just didn’t sleep very well last night and I haven’t eaten that much today. That’s all.”

  The trouble is I’m trying to sound convincing but I can feel that burn at the back of my throat that you get when you need to cry but you don’t want to let it out. I know it must show on my face. I know I won’t be able to hold it in much longer if she doesn’t leave me alone. But I don’t want her to go.

  She takes hold of my hand.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she says. “When I left school I went to secretarial college, the same as my mum had, the same as my sister did and my auntie, come to that. I was good at typing, and shorthand and all of that but I hated the smart clothes and the office and the making the tea for all the men in suits. I hated all of it. I got a good job and I hated that too. I used to cry every Sunday because I had to go back to the office on Monday morning and I used to drink too much every week night to help take the edge off the monotony of going back and doing all the same stuff the next day. And then one day my boyfriend died. Just like that out of the blue, he fell off some scaffolding on a building site and that was that. And that was the kick up the arse I needed. At his funeral the vicar warbled on about the waste of life and knew that I had to do something to make a change if I didn’t want to waste the whole of my life doing a job that made me feel miserable.”

  “Actually, I quite like my job.”

  “Love,” she says, “I’m not telling you to jack in your job. You could easily have died in the pool tonight if Peter, God love him, hadn’t been so quick off the mark. That’s all I’m saying. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think, don’t you think? If you knew you were going to drown this time next year, what would you want to change between now and then?”

  “Those curtains, for sure.” I nod in the direction of the living room curtains, cast-offs from my mum that have always made the room a bit too middle-aged.

  She smiles at me. She smiles at me in the way that you’d expect to come after a wink and I see her for a minute as a plainclothes fairy godmother. She might wave her magic wand and replace my awful curtains with made to measure blinds. She might bring Chips in from the kitchen and turn him into George Clooney.

  “The secret to not drowning,” she says, “is to get out of the pool before you get too tired to keep swimming.”

  She takes one last biscuit, twists the top of the packet and pats me on the shoulder.

  “I’ll just take one more for the road, as long as you’re sure you’re all right. Make sure you see a doctor though, won’t you? I’m sure it’s something and nothing, but it’s always best to see a doctor and put your mind at ease.”

  “I will,” I reassure her, wondering if I’ll bother. “I’ll give them a ring tomorrow.”

  I get up to show her out.

  “Thanks. Thanks ever so much... I don’t even know your name.”

  “Toni.”

  “Toni. Thanks ever so much, for everything.”

  �
��All right, love. See you next week.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Bye, love.”

  “Bye.”

  I close the door behind her and go back into the living room. I think about calling Julie. I think about Julie’s mum. I leave the tea things sitting there on the coffee table and go to bed.

  30

  It’s quiet in the house when I wake up and quiet outside too. There are no cars on the street yet, and in the bed He has his back to me and his breathing is slow and silent. It’s the third time I’ve woken up since I went to bed last night but it’s almost half past six so this time it’s OK to get up. It’s officially morning.

  I have a cup of tea before I get in the shower, and a bowl of Rice Krispies and a piece of toast. I make two pieces but I only eat one. ‘Your eyes are bigger than your belly’ my mum would say, but that’s the great thing about having a dog: nothing goes to waste and nothing’s left behind as evidence. I know I should take Chips out for a walk, but I just let him go for a wander in the garden for a few minutes in the rain and he’s happy with that. He has a wee and a quick sniff round and he’s straight back inside to see if there’s any more toast I don’t want.

  The shower sounds ridiculously loud in this quiet, quiet house but I know it won’t wake Him. There’s an empty Champagne bottle on the kitchen table so the pub quiz clearly went well and the spoils were clearly instantly consumed by the winners. He’ll sleep until the alarm this morning, and probably through a repeated snooze button too.

  The water is warm and lovely at first, but it suddenly goes cold without warning just when my hair is full of shampoo and I’m covered in soap all over. I want to scream. I want to scream out loud, the water is so cold. It’s stinging me and making me gasp but I have to get the shampoo out of my hair and the soap off my skin. It’s unbearable. And then it’s warm again and by the time I step out and wrap the towel around myself I feel like I even quite enjoyed the freezing cold bit.

  At twelve o’clock I woke up to the sound of his key in the door and Jimmy’s voice and the sound of the pair of them staggering around and singing ‘We are the Champions’. I could smell chips, I could hear the telly and when Jimmy finally went home and He came up to bed I lay as still as I could like a game of sleeping lions until I could feel his sleep beside me. And I lay there for ages and all the time all I could think was: ‘you could easily have died in that pool tonight. You could have died in that pool tonight. For fuck’s sake Marion, you could easily have died in that pool tonight, sort your fucking life out before your number’s up.’

  So I lay awake and made a plan. You get up in the morning and you go to work and then you tell Heidi that you fainted last night and you need to go and see the doctor this morning and then you go home and pack your stuff and you get on a train and go to your mum’s and get her to help you make a proper plan of what to do next. And you can ring in sick before you catch the train and tell Heidi you’ve been signed off for a week – better make it two weeks – and then you’ve left your options open about going back or not going back. It was all just like that. Like a proper to-do list, tick off a few little things and then move on.

  But I woke up again just before four. I woke up with that niggling feeling that you have when you know something’s not quite right. That did-I-leave-the-iron-on feeling. That aren’t-I-supposed-to-be-somewhere feeling. What about Chips? What about Julie? What about Mandy? What if my mum tells me not to be so stupid and just sends me home? What if He won’t let me back in when I get here? What if Heidi sacks me and I end up with nowhere to live and only a suitcase full of clothes to my name? The night threw everything it’s got at me until I was struggling to breathe with the panic. Staying is easy: I just get up in the morning like I always do and keep waiting for something to change. Leaving is hard. Leaving is not hard, it’s impossible. I decided not to go. I decided not to be so stupid.

  And now it’s morning again. Now it’s getting light and his shoes are in the doorway to the living room and I pick them up and put them in the hall. I could easily have died in that swimming pool last night. Julie’s mum’s died. My baby died. Chips comes in and sniffs at the shoes and I can hear the alarm clock upstairs. It switches the radio on and then seconds later He turns the music off again. It’s just a few notes but it’s so, so familiar. It’s one of those lyrics that we sang endlessly on the school bus. “Wake me up before you go go,” and I had the T-shirt to go with it. A massive baggy affair that said ‘Choose Life’ across the front. I used to wear it with my leg warmers and a scarf tied in a bow on top of my head. Today I feel like the universe is sending me a great big neon sign and the sign is telling me what to do next. My plan might be crap and I might have half baked it in the middle of the night, but it’s a start.

  I’m dying to tell Julie so I call her. Straight to voicemail so I leave her a message. “Hi, Julie. I’m so sorry about the argument and everything. I’m sorry. I’m thinking of going away for a bit but you can speak to me on this. I hope we can speak soon.”

  It sounds rubbish. I wish I could change it but that’s voicemail for you. Everyone sounds crap. I sit down for a minute. I’m not sure what to do next and Julie might call me back. Or she might text.

  “Marion. Marion. Marion, are you downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  He leans His head over the banister. “I wasn’t sure if you’d left for work already. Any chance you could iron me a shirt before you go? I’ve only got the cufflinks one left in the wardrobe.”

  “Yeah. Just chuck one down and I’ll do it for you.”

  “Thanks. You’re a star. Did you see the bottle in the kitchen? We won. I knew we would.”

  “I saw it,” I say. “Well done!”

  What else am I going to say? ‘I saw it and would very much like to smash it over your head before I leave’?

  So I iron his shirt and, while I’m ironing it and pressing the steam button on the sleeves and the collar, I’m trying to make up my mind whether I should leave Him a note when I go. If I leave one what will it say? I might be back? I won’t be back? I have no idea what I’ll be doing? And if I don’t leave one will he think I’ve gone missing? Will there be a police hunt for me? Will they put Him on TV to make a tearful appeal while a psychologist watches Him for signs that it was Him all along that did me in? Could I get Him framed for murder?

  Clearly not. I can’t even get myself out of the house without having a million panics on how to go about it and whether I should actually go or not. I check the shirt and go over the sleeves again where they’re still a bit crumpled on the back, and then I take it up to Him.

  He’s in the bathroom shaving, so I go and hang the shirt up in the bedroom and go back into the bathroom, put down the toilet seat and sit down.

  “My mum rang while you were out last night,” I lie. “She’s not feeling very well.”

  He doesn’t say anything because He’s shaving but He turns to me briefly and raises an inquisitive eyebrow to show me He’s listening.

  “Actually,” I go on, “She thinks she might have shingles and she’s asked if I can go over and just give her a bit of TLC for a few days. It’s knocked her for six, I think. You know what she’s like. You know how independent she is. If she’s asking for help she must be in a really bad way.”

  He nods at me his agreement and carries on shaving.

  “So I was going to ask Heidi if I can have a few days off work to go and help her out. If Heidi okays it, is that OK with you?”

  He puts down the razor, splashes his face with water and covers it in a towel, drying it slowly and looking at me over the top while He does it. He’s pausing for dramatic effect like the hosts on those TV talent shows. He knows He’s going to say fine. I’m pretty sure He’ll say fine but He wants to keep me guessing.

  “Will you be taking the dog with you? I haven’t got time to walk him.”

  “I’ll have
to check with my mum that it’s OK, but I’m sure it will be. I’m sure that’ll be fine.”

  “Fine, then. It’s fine with me. You go and do your Florence Nightingale bit and I’ll see you when you get back. My shirt’s in the bedroom is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great, thanks.” He hangs the towel over the radiator, gives me a kiss on the cheek as He walks past and leaves me standing there in the bathroom wondering what I need to do next.

  31

  Come on in then,” she grins when she opens the door. “I’ve put you in your old bedroom upstairs but heaven knows where that’s going to sleep.”

  I rang my mum as soon as He’d gone to work, just in case He decided to call her and check what I’d told Him. I’d expected it to be a tough conversation but it was just bonkers.

  “Hi, mum, it’s me, Marion. I need to come and stay with you for a few days.”

  “Marion? What time is it?”

  “It’s quarter past eight.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes mum. It’s Tuesday. Tuesday morning. Is it all right if I come and stay with you for a few days?”

  “Why? What’s so special about Tuesday?”

  “There’s nothing special about Tuesday. Is it all right mum? Is it OK if I come and stay for a few days?”

  “Yes I don’t see why not, but I don’t like your tone very much. It was you that said ‘it’s Tuesday’, like there’s some great significance about Tuesday.”

  “I’m sorry if that’s what it sounded like mum, there’s not. I just need to get away for a bit.”

  “A bit of what?”

  “A bit of space.”

  “Space. That’s a laugh. This place is still bursting at the seams with all your stuff that you don’t want to take to yours but can’t bear for me to get rid of.”