The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  When the band finished and the stage lights dimmed, there was a general retreat indoors to the bar and I supposed he must have headed in too. I didn’t follow. As for Molly, one second she was in a tight scrum with Georgia and Josh, and the next the trio had vanished. I guessed I had at least twenty minutes before she thought to find me again. Lara was side-stage congratulating the musicians, but I was too shy to join her, moving instead to the far edge of the sundeck, the point at which ‘our’ table would normally be situated. The underwater lights had come on, creating pretty clouds of neon blue below the gently bobbing heads of the balloons. I thought of the same water last weekend, ink-black and concealing, and was moved by the different human moods it was able to reflect – or dictate.

  Then Lara was beside me, our bare shoulders bumping. ‘Weren’t they fantastic?’

  ‘They were. Do you need to see them off ?’ There was an injection of hunger in my tone and she responded with a brush on the back of my hand with hers.

  ‘Already done, they’re packing up now. They have to scoot straight off to a second gig. Liam and the guys are helping them with their gear.’

  Of course. I smiled at the image of Lara helping lug amplifiers into the back of a scruffy van. How had she ever washed ashore here, in Elm Hill? How lucky we all were. How lucky I was.

  ‘So, can I borrow you for a moment?’ she said.

  ‘Yes … Just …’ Having been sure, I was suddenly jittery. My brain flashed to Molly, the irritability I’d betrayed when I’d thought she wanted to leave. I would make it up to her; after tonight, I would refocus, reprioritize. ‘Where are the kids, do you know? I’ve lost track of them.’

  ‘The teens were last seen demanding mocktails from the bar staff, poor sods. Everett’s with David and Suki and their kids. Don’t worry, they won’t miss us.’

  Would Ed? I thought. Would Miles?

  She was leading me now past the chill-out zone to the narrow gap between railing and wall, unhooking the security rope and pulling me through before reattaching it. ‘We’re being a bit naughty, going off limits …’ And that step into prohibited territory stirred my blood like a criminal’s. Seizing my hand, she pulled me around the perimeter towards the changing huts on the opposite side. The darkness was thicker at the edges, cloaking us as we came to a halt by the hut closest to the turnstile; the door was yellow, tinged green with the blue light from the pool. At the far end, the main entrance appeared more distant than the 60 or 70 metres I knew it to be, the floating field of balloons between. ‘Come in,’ Lara whispered. ‘Quick, before anyone sees us.’

  It was lightless when she closed the door behind us and for a moment utterly silent.

  ‘Lara? You are in here as well, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The space was tiny, the air extremely warm. Unable to see her, I giggled, groping for the nearest surface. My fingers touched the back wall, my knee the edge of the seat, and then I found smooth partitions to either side, which meant she had to be leaning against the closed door. Feeling her soft, humid breath, I was reminded of her standing close behind me in her bathroom at La Madrague, her fingers smoothing the fabric of the dress, and I responded with a groan. My desire was swelling, growing uncontrollable, and I pressed myself against her, my mouth searching for hers, greedy for her touch, for those fingers to graze and probe. ‘Oh, La –’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, her voice very low pitched, almost a growl, and she moved her face from mine. ‘I know you have before, but not again.’

  She thrust me from her. Overbalancing, I made heavy contact with one of the sides and righted myself.

  ‘Why?’ In the dark, my cheeks flamed. Did she wish me to use her full name, as she did mine? To leave the playful single syllable for Douglas and Andrew and the others? ‘Why?’ I repeated. I wanted to hear her say it, say I was special, but her voice, when it came again, was different. It had a flatness to it, a deathly lack of inflection:

  ‘You have no idea, do you?’

  ‘No idea about what?’ I said.

  ‘About what you did.’

  I felt the blood slow in my veins and with it came the beginning of lightheadedness. ‘What I did? What do you mean?’ Self-preservation – hope – made me dense, limiting my mind’s reach to those sources of confusion closest to the surface: did she mean what had happened in her bedroom? Had I overstepped the mark, misinterpreted that encounter, or the promise of this? Or did she mean my having mentioned the Georgia concern to Ed when she had explicitly asked me not to? Had it had repercussions I was unaware of? Had Ed confronted her privately and upset her? That was surely it. How automatic it was, my blaming of Ed, how traitorous. He was no longer my mate but my scapegoat.

  ‘Years ago, Natalie,’ Lara said, and her voice was gentler now, laced with a new emotion: sorrow. ‘Years ago.’

  Two words that got my blood moving again, that might even have changed the direction of its flow in my veins. Two words and all my fancies, all my vanities, were exposed. Because I did have an idea, of course I did. I think I’d had it all along.

  Stoneborough, August 1985

  The occasion arose in the nick of time: not only was I due to be collected from my grandparents and returned home the very next day, but there had also been a break in the weather, a spell of rain that had put paid to any last woodland adventures. Without access to the pond, Mel and I had stopped talking about our Nessie plot, had all but given up, distracted in any case by the tension between the two of us, the future of our friendship, whatever it had been, whatever it might become. It seemed to me that planning our persecution of Nessie had been virtually as satisfying as doing it.

  Then, on my last full day in the village, the heavens cleared and we all converged on the pond for what would undoubtedly be the final swim of the summer.

  Nessie was there, of course, for everyone else the star turn, and as if responding to our telepathic will she stayed in the water longer than usual. Time after time she sank into the invisible depths, twisting and tumbling and rolling, before exploding into view in that trademark way of hers. Most often, she would surface in the spots touched by the last of the sun, as if caught in her own mission to shatter liquid into glitter. By the time she waded out, the group had thinned and there were few enough left for Mel to be able to order them to scarper and be obeyed. Which left only the three of us.

  She was still towelling herself dry when we pounced. As planned, I pinned her down, face to the ground, while Mel set about her hair with the scissors. The blades were blunt, not at all fit for the task, and the sound was obscene, the sawing of something fibrous and alive. Mel cut it really short, too; right to the scalp.

  Nessie screamed and wriggled so much it was her own fault when her ear got nicked. ‘You’re mental,’ she sobbed, her cheek greasy with blood. ‘There’s something wrong with you two.’

  ‘Shut your face, bitch.’

  Mel spat on her then, a sticky blob that sat on her bare skin between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Everyone hates you!’ Nessie cried. ‘Everyone. All the boys –’

  ‘I said, shut your fucking face!’

  I started thinking how weird it felt to hold a girl down like this against her will. We’d done it so many times with the boys, but this was different. There was none of our usual suppressed laughter: this time we were hard-nosed, iron-handed, like trained officers taking part in a raid. Her response was not predictable, either, for I could feel strength in her fear, not the futile lashing out I was used to, a gathering of spirit rather than an ebbing of it. I had the horrible premonition that she was about to rear up, like she did in the water, to somehow double, triple in strength and defeat us, the way good always defeats evil.

  Almost as if I’d determined it, there was a sudden scramble and she was slithering free, her bare feet sliding backwards in the mud as she tried to launch herself forwards. Without her long hair, she was like a boy, narrow and sinewy, a Mowgli figure.

  ‘Nat
, you idiot!’ At once Mel grabbed at her calves and brought her back down, finding time to shoot me a bad-tempered glare.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, redoubling my grip.

  ‘My mum will call the police,’ Nessie screamed, in breathless gasps, as the final strands were sliced from her scalp.

  ‘What – to tell them her daughter’s a slag?’ I said.

  ‘No one’s going to tell anyone anything,’ Mel said, her voice a blade’s edge, sharper than the tool in her hands. Her blood was up now. Nessie had landed with her head closer to the water’s edge than before, which gave Mel an idea. ‘Hold her under, Nat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got her arms and legs. You hold her head under.’

  She meant under the water. ‘You don’t –?’

  ‘Just do it before the bitch gets away again!’

  And I did. I held her head under. The water was shallow at the edge and the strain of keeping her face down, her head steady, made my muscles ache. I gripped her hair to get tighter control, thinking about how her long hair used to pour from her skull to her elbows when she surfaced, how hard it was now to get even a short handful.

  ‘How long for?’ I asked Mel, panting with exertion.

  ‘Keep going. Count to twenty.’

  I counted quickly, cheating. Then I began to fear I’d lost sense of fast and slow and correcting that added further seconds. I wondered how long Nessie could hold her breath – she sometimes dived for what seemed like minutes – and that took us forward by another ten seconds or so. Then, just as I was about to ask Mel again, Nessie went quite still, her neck devoid of tension, and I slackened my grip in a reflex of terror. Move, I willed her, please move, but her head remained weightless in the water.

  We’ve killed her, I thought.

  ‘Fucking played dead,’ Mel said. ‘Oldest trick in the book. Let’s get out of here.’

  By the pond’s edge Nessie’s hair lay in long muddy rags and we kicked it into the water, like the leftovers of a disappointing snack. The scissors, we lobbed into the pond, right into the deepest part. We didn’t even wait to watch the ripples.

  Sunday, 30 August 2015

  ‘Did you change your name?’ I whispered. In the darkness of the hut my vision was sharpening and I could make out the faint gleam of light particles clinging to the curved bones of her face.

  ‘What?’ Her voice was curt, impatient. ‘Why would I change my name?’

  ‘You weren’t called Lara,’ I said. ‘I know I would have remembered that. What were you called? Did you use your middle name or something?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re the girl.’ My emotions were too unruly to control and the muscles in my face were spasming. I thought I could feel my birthmark pulsing but I knew I must be imagining it. ‘You’re Nessie. That’s what we called you. Did you even know that?’ And it came to me then that her real name had been Leah or Leanne, something like that. It had been exotic then, and considered pretentious on the part of her parents. My stage mother.

  Years I’d waited to be found and punished and now, just as I’d learned to let it go, it had happened.

  ‘You used to practise at the pond,’ I said, my voice trembling.

  ‘Practise what, darling?’ Though her tone was flinty and sarcastic, I felt her fingers touch my face quite tenderly, finding the spot above my eyebrow and smoothing it with the pad of her thumb. Thanks to this mark, this identifying stain, she had recognized me on the very first day.

  Lara was Nessie.

  ‘Your synchro, I suppose. All the turns and dives, it was lovely to watch.’ My voice sounded dreamy, disembodied. ‘I know I didn’t say it at the time, but that’s what I thought. You were beautiful.’

  Her mouth came close to my ear, startling me. ‘I think you must have a defective memory, Nat. My name is Lara and always has been. But I suppose guilt does strange things to your mind. And lust, of course.’

  Even with the distraction of her lips so close to my face, I knew she wasn’t answering in the way she should be: she was speaking lines from a different script. And yet it was what she said, not I, that rang true: of course she’d always been Lara – her name was in the public record; before Channing she’d been Markham. She’d been a competitor from a young age. It was not feasible that Nessie could have been involved in something as uncommon – and ripe for mockery – as synchronized swimming and been able to hide it from the other kids. That was why I had denied the instinct before I could name it: it was false. Meeting Lara, being with her, it had been a true déjà vu, not a second intersection of our fortunes. And it had been caused, as she’d judged in an instant, by guilt.

  But if she wasn’t Nessie, then what did she think I’d done years ago?

  It struck me then that I might be so drunk I had concocted the last few minutes, imagined her whispered comments in some guilty delusion brought on by the recent reunion with Mel and compounded by the stress of my escalating conflict with Ed. I was a believer in the power of hypnotherapy, after all, a fearer of the human mind.

  But no, this was real, because she was continuing to talk to me in the same uncaring way, her fingers rough in my hair. ‘Don’t you agree, Natalie, guilt messes with your brain? Sends you slightly mad?’

  I was suddenly very afraid of her. ‘I want to go back to the party,’ I said, reaching to find the door handle. ‘Please let me out.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t. You’ll stay where you are.’ She blocked my way.

  I knew she was stronger, I knew I wouldn’t fight. I let out a sob, too fast to catch, and at once felt fingers on my face again, touching the tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Natalie.’ She was gentler again, almost tender, disorientating me. ‘In a funny way, I am sorry. It could have been fun. I hope you believe that.’

  ‘La …’

  Her voice hardened once more. ‘I said don’t call me that. Only my family do, and my real friends.’

  And at last a fingernail hooked at a thread of memory: there had been a sister. Nessie had had an older sister who’d been a sporting prodigy, away at a residential camp while her sister was left to contend with the village bullies. If that camp had been a training programme for genuine hopefuls, a regional or national squad perhaps, Lara might have been the absent one, the one who returned at the end of the summer to find her sister terrorized and broken.

  A younger sister whose beauty had peaked at an early age …

  The first knock was so faint I hardly registered it, but Lara reacted before the second one came, manoeuvring me deep into the corner, the edge of the seat cutting painfully into my legs. ‘Don’t even think about trying to leave.’

  ‘Iona,’ I said simply. ‘Nessie was Iona, wasn’t she?’

  34

  Monday, 31 August, 9.30 a.m.

  My tea is finished but I’m thirsty, so thirsty. Captivated by the display of water bottles in the chiller cabinet, backlit and glowing like elixirs or medicines, I decide to buy one to drink in the car. It will not heal me but it will restore me for now.

  By the time I’ve taken one and turned to face the room again, there’s a new presence in the small, cheerful space, an alteration in the atmosphere, as if the morning has only now chosen to reveal itself.

  And yet everything looks the same.

  I join the queue to pay. At home, my family awaits: my duty, my love, my meaning, everything. Molly’s phone is still in my hand, its screen displaying those messages shared with a girl upstairs fighting for her life. 2/36, 1/57, 2/58 … An idea sparks: the numbers are timings, perhaps, from those sprint races at the lido, the role that helped her overcome her terror of the water’s edge. My pulse quickens as a tangle of thoughts begins its unravelling, but before I settle on any single one my eye is caught by a familiar mannerism: an ankle rotating, a well-shod foot circling one way and then the other, as if to ease an ache in the joint. Above, a pale trouser leg, creased and discoloured. I hear a trace of a voice giving thanks, then the man turn
s, a coffee in each hand.

  He sees me. He waits for my gaze to rise to meet his.

  For a few moments I can’t breathe. I put the water bottle down on the nearest table and step away from the queue, but my legs don’t work as they should and I stumble.

  When I look again he is directly in front of me, feet planted solidly, takeout coffees clutched like twin grenades.

  Him.

  35

  Sunday, 30 August – eleven hours earlier

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lara snapped. ‘Iona’s got nothing to do with this. You really have lost your mind, haven’t you?’

  ‘But –’

  There was the sound of a bolt sliding from its casing, a sudden release of heat, then the re-sealing of the door. Now there was a third person in the hut. I would have known him by senses other than sight, the quiet tension of him, an energy separate from heat or odour.

  ‘Hello, Nat,’ Miles said.

  ‘Thank God!’ I cried. ‘Do you know what’s going on here?’ There was the lilt of appeal in my voice, a note of umbrage, as if Lara had failed me, mistaken me, and now Miles must adjudicate and – quickly, please – free me.

  But he did not answer.

  ‘Miles? Is this to do with Iona? Tell me!’

  ‘Forget Iona,’ Lara said. ‘You’re deluded. So shut up, please.’

  Now I became properly aware of the temperature, uncomfortably, unnaturally high. There were three of us in a confined space and I was conscious of every breath, thermal, thick with tequila. Blood roared in my ears as I felt the beginnings of claustrophobia.

  At last Miles spoke, his tone as remote and agreeable as it had been when we’d spoken earlier in the evening. ‘Take your clothes off.’