by Michel Faber
Then, as the car was drawing to a halt in front of the Melbourne public baths, this kid, this Anthony who had grown out of being the Ant she’d lost to the State five years ago, said to her,
‘Are you still sick?’
‘I used to be really sick, ‘was Gail’s answer. ‘Now I’m a lot better.’
The boy looked unimpressed.
‘Moira says people shouldn’t take medicine if they’re not sick.’
Moira was Anthony’s fostercarer. He didn’t call her Mum. But then he didn’t call Gail Mum either. He was careful not to call her anything.
‘Your mum is only a little bit sick now,’ the social worker chipped in, his head twisted away as he parked the car. ‘The last bit.’
Gail hadn’t expected this from him. She was glad the social worker was alive now, grateful. She was willing to do anything for him, anything he wanted, like for free. Although she’d better be careful who she slept with these days, if she wanted to get Ant back.
‘Two,’ she told the swimming pool cashier. ‘One child and one … ah … grown-up.’ She flinched at the stumble: years of addiction had half-dissolved lots of words she’d once had no problem coming out with. They were like things you leave in a box in the garage and then when you look for them years later you find the water’s got to them.
This visit to the swimming pool was Ant’s idea, as far as Gail knew. She didn’t know very far, though. The social worker would suggest an outing with Anthony, like going to the movies, and Gail would go to the movies with Anthony. Everything was arranged: which movie, which cinema, which session time. Who decided? Gail wasn’t sure, except that it wasn’t her. Maybe Anthony had told Moira he really liked swimming and Moira had told the social worker, and the social worker had taken it from there. Maybe it was the other way around.
Gail had never been to this swimming pool before, had never been to any swimming pool since she’d been a schoolgirl, slouching in the audience at the water sports finals, distracted by nicotine craving. Those trials had been held in the open air, in a giant complex of pools. This place she and Ant were entering now was different altogether, an indoor place, like a railway-station-sized bathroom built around a railway-platform-sized bath. A combination of electric light and sunshine from the many windows and skylights made it a kind of in-between world, neither inside nor out.
The water was warm, something Gail didn’t really believe until she dangled her naked foot off the edge. She’d imagined that ‘heated’ meant the water sort of had the chill taken off it, but it was as warm as a bath: body temperature maybe. She couldn’t be sure. Her own body thermostat had been well and truly fucked for years.
Gail and Ant didn’t need to go to the changing rooms; they both had their swimgear on underneath their street clothes – another detail overseen by the social worker, this man who brought them together and, just by existing, kept them officially apart.
There were only about ten or eleven people in the pool, half of them adults swimming or hanging off the sides near the deep end. One length of the pool had been roped off by a floating divider of coloured plastic, to give serious swimmers one narrow lane to do their laps in. A well-muscled Japanese man prepared to enter this strip; a well-fleshed Australian woman was doing the backstroke. Everyone else was in the unrestricted part of the pool. Teenagers, children and their parents played at the shallow end, taking no notice of Gail and Anthony climbing in. Anthony was six and the water was up to his chest; Gail was twenty-three and the water was up to her navel. She squatted to come down to his level, and because it was warmer underwater.
‘Can you swim?’ she asked, noticing how awkwardly Ant was looking down at the water around his chest and his faraway feet on the bottom of the pool.
‘Yeah, I swim all the time,’ he said. ‘I swim real good,’ and immediately he gave a succession of startling demonstrations which consisted of throwing himself forward in the water, sinking, thrashing his arms and legs as rapidly as he could, and surfacing in a blind sputter. He couldn’t even tell which direction he was facing when he surfaced, and he would swivel his head, blinking and burping, trying to orient himself to where he had started.
‘I can swim too,’ said Gail. ‘But not very well.’
She’d learned to swim in a backyard swimming pool, one of those round, blue, free-standing things from the Clark Rubber store in Ferntree Gully, and she had been Anthony’s age. The boy whose family owned the pool had shown her how to float and how to move forward. He also tried to show her how to synchronise the arm and leg movements and turn her head from side to side to get the breaths in, but she hadn’t mastered that part. Then he had shown her his penis, and she had shown him her chubby little vulva: the pre-agreed reason for the game.
She wasn’t chubby now. She was thin and grown-up. It had cost her $2.80 to get into the pool, twice as much as Ant. That was where growing up got you: ADULTS, $2.80.
A grotesquely overweight man climbed in at the children’s end and waded out towards the deep, rolls of fat on his back humping in and out of the water as he began to swim.
‘How come that man’s swimming when he’s so fat?’ Anthony whispered to her, his awe overwhelming his reserve. Anxious to have the answer, Gail had to think hard. Other people’s motivations, or even her own, were not her strong point.
‘His doctor probably told him to,’ she said at last.
She didn’t perceive the man as being particularly grotesque. He was a member of the straight world, and members of the straight world were normal, they had their place. The fat man belonged here with the mothers and their paddling children, the idle athletes and goggled teenagers; he could claim the right to displace as much water as he wished, whereas Gail, pale from night-living and wasted by narcotics, was an alien object which might at any moment be fished out of the pool by an angry official. She looked down at herself in the water, at the spindly white legs coming out of the oversized red shorts, and then looked at Ant. His shorts were oversized too, yet they were very cute on him: he looked as if he was about to grow into them, whereas she seemed to be shrinking out of hers.
Anthony continued to demonstrate his mastery of swimming for her, throwing himself, thrashing furiously underwater, and surfacing: Gail tried to look as if she were looking on approvingly, but really she was staring at the well-fleshed woman swimming backstroke in the roped-off lane. This woman was so powerful and steady, completing length after length, from the deep end to the shallow and back to the deep, a serious swimmer, her breasts sticking up out of the water. She was another species, as different from Gail as a seal or a porpoise. Gail laid one hand across her own breast. Her tube top had almost nothing inside it; her wrist rested against bone. Heroin had wasted her. The first time the social workers had taken Ant away from her, they had given her a milk expresser, but there had been nothing to express.
On impulse she started swimming, in her own way. All she could do was lie face-down in the water until her body started to float up to the top, and then with slow, sweeping strokes she moved forward. Once again, for the first time since learning to swim in that backyard pool, she tried the breathing part, but as soon as she lifted her head out of the water the rest of her started to sink. She was disappointed; she had hoped that somehow during the long and horrible lifetime she’d lived since first trying, she might have gained the knack sort of automatically.
She lay face down in the water again, waiting to be buoyed up, and then she swam and swam, back and forth across the shallow end of the pool. At first she swam with her eyes closed, anticipating the touch of her fingers against the pool’s side or the floating rope, but after she’d hit her head on the tiles twice, and been kicked by one of the serious swimmers, she swam with her eyes open, surprised to find it didn’t hurt. She couldn’t see much except luminous chlorine blue, disturbed every now and then by a psychedelic glimpse of an approaching body. Sometimes it was Anthony’s body trying to swim beside her, a blur of flailing little arms and legs distorted by m
otion and diffusion.
Eventually she worked up the courage to touch him, to signal him up.
‘It’s better if you float first,’ she said. ‘Watch me.’
She demonstrated, and he watched, and then, when she’d surfaced and was waiting for him to imitate her, he said,
‘I’ve been watching you. I’ve been doing the same as you for ages.’
‘You don’t wait long enough. You start trying to move around before you’re floating.’
His answer to that was to throw himself forward in the water next to her, to demonstrate that no matter how many long, long microseconds he could bear to wait, his body wasn’t borne up the way hers was. Gail thought of telling him to keep still longer, but suddenly she was sickened by an image, rammed into her mind like a slide into a slide-viewer, of Ant floating on top of the water, dead.
‘How about you hold on to me while I swim?’ she suggested, so shaken by the dead son still floating in her head that she forgot to be afraid of rejection.
Anthony looked away from her, ignoring her suggestion it seemed, towards a part of the pool where a burly Italian man was playing a game with his daughter. Over and over the man would lift the child out of the water, arrange her weight carefully in his arms, and toss her as far and as high as he could. The girl shrieked with delight every time she made her splash.
‘Can you do that to me?’ Anthony asked.
No, Gail thought automatically, the way she’d always done when asked to attempt anything not related to heroin. Everything else was too hard.
‘I’m only little,’ she tried to explain.
Anthony looked at her as if she was crazy: couldn’t she see the difference between them? To make him happy was so easy: a simple physical act. He was a child, she was a grown-up, therefore she could do it: the pleasure was hers to give or withhold.
Gail looked down at him, trying to assess how big or small he really was. Excitement shone on his face, like a sheen of chemical which could contort his features into joy or distress depending on what happened next.
What happened next was that she picked him up and threw him as far as she could. He shrieked with delight, just like the Italian man’s little girl. It was as simple as that.
‘Again! Again!’ he squealed, wading back to her, and they did it again. He had forgotten to be wary of her, and Gail felt secure enough to cope with the possibility of his remembering. It wouldn’t last, but she was happy, incredibly happy, treating herself to dose after dose of infectious excitement.
Eventually when she was too exhausted to toss him anymore she did some more swimming, and this time he held on to her, pulled through the water at first by his hands on her ankle, then by his arms around her neck. His weight was the most satisfying physical sensation she could ever remember having.
She couldn’t get over how easy physical intimacy was in the water. They were more buoyant; if they moved towards each other they were together so suddenly that there was nothing to do about it but accept. Also the water was a reassuring medium between them – she could even embrace him, his legs wrapped around her waist, and the water would keep their bodies discrete and a little unreal, just enough to make it possible. An embrace in the empty air out there in the real world would be so much more difficult. How could you start it out there, with nothing helping you towards the other person, and how could you end it, with no medium to ease you apart, only the awkward unclenching of decision? She remembered their previous outings together, which had been visits to the movies mostly. Gail had sat there in the dark next to Anthony, wondering if she could get away with laying her arm along the top of his seat so that when he sat back he might feel it there around his shoulders. She remembered the mingled taste of Methadone and choc-top ice cream, and the gigantic images of robots, monsters and explosions whose reflected light flickered on the face of her son.
Never again, she thought. It’s the pool from now on.
But already there was a problem.
The familiar pain in her guts had come.
‘We have to get out soon,’ she said to Anthony, but he played on as if he had water in his ears.
‘We have to get out now,’ she said a few moments later, as the pain screwed deeper.
‘Oh please, not yet Mum!’
Hearing it, she realised she would do anything, anything for that last word.
‘OK, you stay for a while,’ she said. ‘But I have to get out now. I’ll come back and watch you from the edge.’
He seemed happy with that, so she climbed up the little steel ladder out of the pool. The unheated air felt freezing. Her shorts stuck heavily to her goose-pimpled flesh, and underneath her sodden tank top her nipples tightened painfully. She hobbled to where she had left her clothes, scooped them up and rushed to the changing room.
Her body temperature seemed to be dropping at the rate of one degree per second, and she undressed in a clumsy frenzy. The vision of Anthony floating face down in the water slotted into her mind again; he looked dead, as only a dead child can look.
The well-fleshed woman, the serious swimmer, was in the changing room too, observing Gail’s anxiousness with mild curiosity as she stepped backwards into a steaming shower. Her pubic hair was thick and black; she was probably wondering why Gail had none. Really, thought Gail, now that I’m off the game I should stop shaving it, let it grow …
Every twenty seconds or so Gail hurried to the door of the changing room, towel wrapped around her, to make sure her boy was still alive. Then she would hurry back inside and dry herself some more. Her skinny limbs seemed to slip through the fabric of the towel untouched, remaining cold and wet no matter how much she rubbed. There was water in the hollows of her collarbones, water running down the hardened lines of her arms and legs. The pain in her guts grew and grew as she dressed, and finally she couldn’t contain it any longer. After checking on Anthony one more time, she shut herself into the toilet and stayed there, doubled up, for many minutes.
The diarrhoea took its sweet time as usual, and all the while her son was in the pool gasping blue water into his lungs, thrashing around under the surface in such a way that the others would think he was just playing, no different from when his mother had been in there with him. She was dizzy with pain and panic, considered staggering out there with her jeans around her ankles. Then suddenly the pain subsided. Something had rearranged itself inside her.
Back at the poolside moments later, she determined at a glance that none of the heads above water was Anthony’s, and she peered anxiously at the indistinct bodies underneath. In the outside world the sun was setting, so that the indoor light was all electric now, cold and brutal. Running sideways along the edge of the pool, Gail became aware of the social worker standing on the other side, looking in also, but she didn’t really care. She understood that if he was blaming her for Anthony’s death, this was less important than Anthony’s death itself.
‘Anthony!’ she called.
A hand on her arm sent a shock through her, like a stray electric spark. Anthony had emerged from the other changing room, dressed and dry, his hair neatly combed. Of course she’d imagined that when the time came for him to come out of the pool she would have to take him into the changing room with her, the way she’d always taken him into toilets when he was a baby, but she could see now that that was half a lifetime ago.
With an inarticulate noise of relief and effort, she swept him up into her arms, swaying a little, surprised at his weight out of the water.
Simultaneously she wished never to let him go, and yet longed to put him down; his intrusion into her was so shocking, deeper and more merciless than anything she had ever suffered from men or needles. How could they compare, those thousand shallow, anaesthetic penetrations, when here she was fully clothed at a suburban swimming pool, blasted open and infused by this little alien she herself had made?
She’d had enough for one day, she was ready to call it quits, to sleep alone in her empty flat for fourteen hours and hand thi
s heavy, heavy child of hers over to the social worker, and on to Moira Whatsername, until she’d recovered and was ready to cope with this feeling again.
But as the social worker walked towards them, Anthony leaned close to her face and whispered in her ear,
‘That was fun, Mum. What next?’
EXPLAINING COCONUTS
The blood-red double doors swing open, sending a false breeze through the recycled tropical air, and yet another sweaty foreigner walks in. The desk clerks and cleaners and bellboys look up for an instant, then revert to their standby mode. Just another coconut man, they think.
Dozens of foreigners have been arriving from all over the world all day, many hours before the advertised starting time of the event. They are wealthy men, important men, not the sort of men who would usually sit around waiting for anything, especially not on ugly stainless-steel chairs upholstered in lime-green velour. They glance at wristwatches that resemble the counterfeits on sale throughout Indonesia, but are worth a hundred times more. They fiddle with gold and silver cuff-links that were gifts from business associates or absent spouses. Nothing will make the time go faster. They are determined – even the ones who are alcoholics – to stay sober.
The conference room is in a hotel in Jakarta that describes itself as world class. Of course the men know that any hotel which feels the need to describe itself as world class is not. Subtle faux pas in the brochure bear this out: misspellings, unnecessary capitalisations, references to ‘authentic atmosphere’ and the ‘lucious green paddy fields that surround the Hotel’s classic temple style architetture’. None of this matters to the men, not even to the ones who are architects and hotel owners by trade.
Nor do these men care that the Magdalaya Hotel’s echoing gymnasium lacks the facilities to which they’re accustomed, that the water of the swimming pool lies chlorinous and still, and that, outside in the shimmering heat, the nets of the tennis courts are crawling with bees. They have not come here for these things. They have come here for pleasures that are available nowhere else on earth.
