by Libby Page
“I hope he feels better soon,” said the school receptionist.
Once he has finished a length he dives underwater and sits cross-legged on the bottom. He holds his breath and counts to ten. Looking up, the sun makes a crisscross pattern on the surface as though it has caught the pool in a net. The water presses his chest and fills his nose; he blows a stream of bubbles and watches them dance in front of him. His parents think he is at school; his teachers think he is at home with a fever. No one who knows him knows that he is sitting on the bottom of the pool.
The lido greeted him like the kind of friend you can sit with in comfortable silence; here was a place where he could be himself.
Every now and then thoughts of his parents slip into his head. He wonders if it is his fault and whether they would still be in love if they had never had a son. His eyes are sore, but he tells himself it is probably just chlorine seeping into his goggles.
He wishes he had gills so that he could stay there forever, lying on the gritty bottom and staring up at the sky. Down there no one can find him, nothing could hurt him, and he isn’t a boy but a fish.
CHAPTER 17
They were a couple, like the quotation marks around a sentence. They fit together and made each other feel less afraid and less alone. George was afraid of being a nobody: he was a somebody with her. Rosemary was afraid of being left behind: he held her hand and took her with him.
Their friends knew them as Rosemary and George, George and Rosemary. They came in a pair like salt and pepper.
In five years they had swum thousands of lengths, walked hundreds of laps around the park (walking extra slowly just so they could have longer holding each other’s hand), and grown up together.
He proposed in his swimming trunks. The pool had only just opened again after the winter and they were going for their first swim of the season. It was still cold; the lifeguard was wearing a thick wool coat with the collar turned up against the chill.
It was a Sunday, so the greengrocer shop that George had taken over from his parents was closed. They had the morning to themselves before the deliveries started coming in for the next day.
They swam together like seals and then sat on the decking wrapped in their towels and sitting close together for warmth. They ordered two cups of tea from Mr. Fry’s snack shop, holding hands and watching the steam rise off their tea and off the surface of the water.
The calm was like an umbrella, sheltering them. They breathed in the smell of the lido and the possibility of rain. Rosemary thought about the first time they made love on the cold decking close to where they sat. She thought about how she had first met him on the day that war ended and her life began.
And then he turned and looked at her. He didn’t get down on one knee. There was no music and the sun didn’t suddenly smile from behind a cloud. In fact it was a thoroughly normal, gray day—the sky the color of concrete.
“Marry me, Rosy,” he said. There was no question mark. No question mark was needed. She already knew that the answer to every question was him.
CHAPTER 18
“How are you getting on with the story?” says Phil several days after Kate’s talk with Rosemary. Kate pulls her typed-up interview with Rosemary, and the news story she has written to accompany it, from her bag and hands them to him. He sits at his desk and reads, stroking his vast stomach—a habit that Kate finds disconcerting. It makes her feel as though he is digesting her words and that they are giving him heartburn. She hates waiting for people to read her work—it makes the Panic climb into her throat.
Jay is in the office today and she catches his eye. They smile at each other.
After a while Phil nods.
“Good,” he says. “People—that’s what this newspaper is about. Our readers like to see the human side of everything.”
Kate smiles, feeling like she is at school again and she’s being praised by the teacher. It still feels as good, even if she feels ashamed for taking pleasure in such a small compliment. Phil gives his stomach a little pat.
“We should do a series on this—follow any developments, speak to some other lido users. The council—have you spoken to the council yet? Well, do that next. In fact, do that now.”
Kate nods and packs up her things, her mind racing, not trusting herself to speak. She has never written a series before and feels excited and terrified by it. She waves goodbye to Jay and heads outside.
As a journalist she should be used to council offices and town halls, but Kate still finds them intimidating. Just like banks and churches, they make her feel small. That’s probably the point, she thinks.
You can see the clock tower of the town hall from a distance. Its face watches the busy junction opposite the cinema and the McDonald’s that is still remembered for a shooting in the queue. The clock has seen it all. Tall columns and a stone shield guard the entrance at the top of steps that lead to the town hall, steps that are often covered in confetti.
Once inside, she is asked to wait. An elderly man is sitting at the end of a bench opposite Kate. His hands shake in his lap. He is wearing a long coat, gray trousers, and trainers. Kate notices that the laces don’t match. The man reaches into his pocket and takes out a bag of Fisherman’s Friend.
“Would you like one?” he says in a strong South London accent.
“No. Thank you though.”
“I’m getting evicted,” says the man. “In case you’re wondering why I’m here. It’s like the doctors, isn’t it? You wonder but you’re not supposed to ask. You try and guess which one’s faking a cold and which one’s dying. I particularly like to pick out the pregnant ones. They always look fucking terrified, the poor cunts.”
Kate raises an eyebrow. The old man laughs and sucks on his sweet. It makes a popping noise.
“Sorry, I know the ladies hate it when I say cunt.”
A woman comes out of one of the rooms along the corridor and crosses the hall. She looks at them before pushing open the door to the bathrooms. Kate and the man are silent as she passes.
“I’m being kicked out,” he says again. “They’re knocking down the building I live in. Putting up some swish new place with a gym and all that. The flats are old but they do their job, you know? I’ve been there forty years. It’s my home.”
He shuffles and puts another Fisherman’s Friend in his mouth. Kate looks at him and wonders at his story—where he will go and who will be there with him when he goes.
“I’m sorry,” she says after a moment. “I’m so sorry about your home.” And she means it. He sniffs and nods his head.
“Do you remember the name of the company that are building the new flats by any chance?” Kate asks.
The man laughs.
“Paradise! Paradise Living is their name. I’m being kicked out of my home to make way for ‘paradise.’ ”
Kate feels a jolt run through her, thinking of the lido.
“I work for the Brixton Chronicle,” she says. “I’m sure they’d be interested in your story . . .”
She reaches into her bag and takes out her business card, handing it to the man. He holds it for a moment, then nods at her and slips it in his pocket. A door opens and a woman holding a folder opens it and looks at the man.
“If you’d like to come through.”
He stands up slowly and heads to the door.
“It was nice to meet you. I hope you’re not pregnant, or dying.” He winks at Kate and follows the woman down the corridor.
“Hello?” Kate calls into the house, knowing that she won’t get a response. The door clicks shut behind her and she squeezes past the bicycle in the hallway to reach her bedroom.
The meeting did not go well. She tried to be authoritative, but she looks younger than she is. And she is a woman. She is used to not being taken seriously.
The councillor was middle-aged and wore a faded gray suit. He offered her coffee and got up to make it himself from a machine on the other side of the stuffy room. As they talked she heard the p
hrases she had expected: “redevelopment,” “cash-strapped,” “nonprofitable,” “we’ve tried.”
“I’m sorry,” said the councillor. “We don’t want to do this, either, but the offer from Paradise Living—well at the moment it seems like it might be the only option. It’s unfortunate, we know that. But these things happen. Neighborhoods change, cities change. That’s just the way it is.”
She took notes and asked the questions she had prewritten in her notebook, but as she talked she couldn’t help thinking of what she had said to Rosemary: Maybe I can help.
She wasn’t going to be able to help. She was hardly even going to be able to write another article. She was a terrible journalist and a weak person who looked thirteen years old and felt the same age a lot of the time. She lived in a dirty house with people who didn’t care if she’d had a bad day at work or drowned in the canal.
She had felt her skin prickling and the room shrinking as she sat and listened to the councillor. The coffee smelled burnt and it made her feel sick; everything made her feel sick.
She reaches into the cupboard by the desk in her room and pulls out a pot of peanut butter and a spoon.
At the end of the meeting she had been ready to go and she could tell the councillor was ready for her to leave. But just before she left the room he said the first useful thing all conversation.
“We will be having a meeting in the town hall in two weeks’ time. Local residents are invited to attend and voice their concerns.”
Kate raises the heaped spoon to her mouth, then stops. She will go to the meeting, she decides. And she won’t be alone. Maybe she can’t help, but she can try. And with a smile she swallows the smooth spoonful of comfort.
Brockwell Lido Threatened by Closure
Lambeth Council announces struggle to keep local lido afloat
By Kate Matthews
Private bids have been made to acquire Brixton’s outdoor pool and gym for redevelopment, as Lambeth Council announces rocky finances at the lido. The most notable offer is from property development firm Paradise Living, who want to develop the pool into a private gym for residents of their new flats.
Dave French, a spokesperson from Lambeth Council, said, “I can confirm that we are currently looking at our options with regards to Brockwell Lido and its future. At the moment nothing is decided, but it is true that running costs are high. We are considering offers, including from Paradise Living. It is uncertain whether the pool will remain open.”
During the summer the pool welcomes hundreds of visitors every day, but the colder months are less popular.
Geoff Barclay, Brockwell Lido manager, said, “We are all naturally concerned by this news. Brockwell Lido is a special place within our community.”
“A private gym would add real value to our properties,” said a Paradise Living spokesperson. “Tenants and purchasers in our buildings would have exclusive access to the top-end facilities.”
The council is currently reviewing proposals and more news will be announced in the coming months.
CHAPTER 19
It is dark and a fox is nuzzling a garbage bag outside a house on a street in Brixton. The fox pushes her nose farther into the plastic until it bursts like a balloon and dinner comes spilling out. On the menu tonight: a half-eaten bagel, the smeared leftovers of a can of mackerel, and the final dregs of a pot of peanut butter. The fox dines well but quickly. She makes a final check of the bag to make sure she hasn’t missed anything and then trots down the path and back onto the road. The street is made up of two rows of terraced houses. Some have cars outside them but most don’t. There are gates and low hedges outside some, paved driveways outside others. Some have pots outside the doors where flowers are just starting to burst into life.
The fox detours left to make a quick investigation of a toppled-over plastic bin in a garden overgrown with weeds and old bicycle parts. She makes a good discovery: a not-quite-empty box of fried chicken.
As she continues along the road the streetlamps catch her in their glow every few paces. But this city fox isn’t afraid of the light. Instead she hurries quickly and steadily down the street until she meets the busy road. She joins it at a bus stop where a couple embrace against the stop sign. The woman wears one shoe. One leg is bent and resting against the pole and her lover presses into her. Next to them a woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform tries to peer around the entwined bodies to find her bus number on the sign.
The fox passes them without being noticed and follows the direction of the buses that roar down the road. She tries some bins outside shops that have metal shutters pulled down to the pavement. One shop is still open: a hunk of meat rotates on a metal rod in the window and a queue lines outside the door. The fox feasts on chips that have been discarded like cigarette butts in the street.
Just past the kebab shop she turns a corner into a quiet square fenced with metal railings and a hedge. Tall houses face onto the square and from a window she can hear a baby crying and a father singing. She follows a path through the small garden alongside benches where the dark shapes of bodies lie still, only occasionally shuffling position under sleeping bags and blankets that are wet with dew. Beneath one bench is a rucksack with half a loaf of bread poking out the top. The fox pulls the bag into her teeth, dragging it to the other side of the square where she quickly eats, leaving the empty bag behind.
The night is turning to morning in the lower corners of the sky. Shapes that were black are turning to indigo blue. The fox leaves the square and makes her way quickly down the road, tail flicking behind her like a white comma as she runs.
A small group has gathered around a young man who has fallen into the road. Two men in high visibility jackets, on their way to work, are pulling him up by the shoulders and sitting him on the pavement. They sit next to him, put their arms around him, and ask him if he is okay. The fox skips over the young man’s wallet, which he has dropped in the gutter.
“Don’t lose this mate,” says one of the men, reaching for the wallet and pushing it into the young man’s pocket.
The fox makes her way past the bus stops and the sleeping schoolyard and then loops back down another road lined with houses until she reaches the edge of the park. She wriggles her full belly under the fence and disappears into the dark that is slowly becoming light with morning.
CHAPTER 20
“I don’t understand,” says Rosemary on the phone.
“The meeting is in two weeks. It’s our chance to have our say about the plans to close the lido,” Kate says.
Rosemary is in her living room, the balcony doors open and her body warm with the late morning sun. Her swimsuit hangs on the washing line, nearly dry after her morning swim. She had been contemplating a nap—just existing could be exhausting these days.
“This is our chance to try and persuade the council not to sell to Paradise Living—not to close the lido,” says Kate. “But we need more people; do you think you can help get more people?”
One of the things about getting older is that you find your circle of friends shrinks. They keep dying on you. Rosemary thinks about the funerals she has been to over the past ten years. She remembers Maureen, one of the other children who had stayed in Brixton during the war and who had helped Rosemary and her mother with the makeshift “school” in their kitchen. Losing her, that last remaining link to that specific part of her childhood, had shaken Rosemary. Maureen’s husband, Jack, had followed a few months after—and Rosemary got out her black skirt suit again. There had been less expected ones, too, like her old friend Florence, whom she met in the library when Florence was a teacher and would bring children in to choose books. Except that funeral wasn’t for Florence—it was for her daughter. Rosemary hasn’t seen Florence in a long time now—she lives in a nursing home in Dulwich and wouldn’t recognize Rosemary anymore even if she did come to visit.
Rosemary sighs deeply.
“But you’ve lived here all your life,” says Kate. “You must know people who
care as much as you do.”
“I don’t want to ask for help.”
“But it’s not asking for you,” says Kate. “It’s for the lido.”
Rosemary pauses. She pictures George opening his eyes wide when they were both underwater, smiling at her. She thinks of the people she knows in Brixton: Frank and Jermaine at the bookshop, Hope, Ahmed, Ellis and his son, Jake . . . And she thinks about the lido as a tennis court, filled with cement.
“Yes,” she says after a moment. “Yes, you’re right. We have to save the lido, Kate.”
As she says it Rosemary feels an aching in her chest. With one hand still on the phone, she puts the other on the edge of the sofa and looks over at George’s photo on the bookshelf to strengthen her. I will try not to let you down, she says silently, looking at the face she has loved since she was sixteen.
“I think I know what to do,” Rosemary says to Kate. “Are you free later?”
They meet outside the underground station, Kate carrying a notebook and a stack of flyers, Rosemary leaning on an empty plastic shopping trolley.
“Hello,” says Kate, balancing the flyers and notebooks on one arm and waving as Rosemary approaches. Kate’s hair is down today and tucked behind her ears. Rosemary thinks again how young she looks and can’t help but smile.
“Are you ready to meet Brixton?” Rosemary says.
Kate nods and they set off, Rosemary and her shopping trolley leading the way and Kate following slowly.
