by Gil McNeil
Julia passed out through the electric doors of the hospital into a new world, its colours brighter and its human noises louder than ever before. A mother pushed a baby past in a humbug-striped buggy and its small face was soft and bright as a flower; an old man, older than Julia would ever be, hobbled past and his gait seemed almost a dance. She closed her eyes, shook her head violently, then looked down the road at the happy riot of cars and lorries, hearing with incredulity the vivid hum of life. In two years – maybe less, not likely more – she would be dead. The doctors had said so. The tests were incontrovertible. This thing in her bones was too deep for excision, too rampant to be held off for long with chemicals. They had not wanted to tell her while she was alone, knowing that she lived by herself, but Julia had insisted. Thirty years of widowhood, she said tartly, had taught her to deal with matters of all kinds without imposing on other people. Even now, confronted with the need to inform the office manager and alert Human Resources to her plight, she shrank from the duty. Her coming death, surely, was her own business. The dark would come, and then whatever lay beyond the dark – Julia was not without vague unexamined religious belief. But to discuss the darkness, and what to do with the months before it came, was an additional embarrassment that Julia saw no need to court. Not yet, anyway. If timor mortis came over her later on, or if she couldn’t look after herself even before the hospice stage, she would tell Sally and Jack or perhaps her cousin Catherine. But there was no need to trouble them with it now, and endure up to two years of pity. If she had had children, now, that would be different; they would need to be prepared. But she and Joe had had no children. A blessing, really.
‘It won’t be much of a funeral,’ she said, aloud but under her breath; she was walking homeward now past the Odeon, heading for the 1930s red-brick block where she and Joe had thought themselves so lucky to find a corner flat. And: ‘Oh, I’d better make a proper will.’ It still seemed incredible, as she walked with long strides in her flat sensible shoes, that this efficient body would soon be still and silent. At the gate of the flats she felt suddenly reluctant to go in, but having eaten nothing for breakfast, on hospital instructions, she was hungry and thirsty. Glancing across the road to the council leisure centre, she remembered that Sally had told her the café there was good.
She crossed the road, not bothering to look around her – what need, now? As soon a lorry as a hospice – and went in. While she waited for her tea and scone, standing by the Formica counter, she picked up a flyer. All her life, Julia had been unable to wait without reading something, even if it was only a safety notice or a railway ticket. And this, at least, had an intriguing headline:
SWIM TO HOLLAND!
Get fit and see Europe! Swim the equivalent distance of the sea crossing from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, all within your safe and friendly local pool, and ferry operators Nordseespeed will give you a FREE return foot-passenger ticket from Harwich. And to complete your well-earned minibreak, our healthy-living sponsors Instabran will throw in a free return train ticket to Amsterdam.
[185 km or 100 nautical miles is 7,400 lengths.]
The café was empty. The girl on the counter pushed her tea across, slopping a little into the saucer.
‘What’s all this?’ said Julia, tapping the flyer. ‘Are people really going to swim 7,400 lengths?’
‘Ooh yeah,’ said the girl. ‘We’ve given out loads of record cards. They have to be signed off, see, every time you come and do your lengths. My boyfriend’s up to 840, I’ve got nearly 300; it’s amazing how they build up.’
‘But the fare’s not much anyway, not for foot passengers,’ protested Julia, noticing with relief the way that this ordinary conversation was somehow shrinking the cold, hard knot of despair in her stomach. ‘And it costs about two pounds to swim, so if you came – what – about three hundred times, to do twenty lengths or whatever, you’d have spent £600 – for a thirty-quid ticket.’
‘There’s concessions,’ said the girl rather haughtily. ‘And anyway, it’s a sort of game, innit? Makes you want to get the lengths in. Health, an’ that.’
Julia took the flyer with her, and gazed down at it while she drank her tea and brushed the crumbs off the lapels of her dull sensible jacket. Active, she thought. The doctor said I should swim. Perhaps I’ll swim to Holland, or sink in the attempt. Carrying her plate back, noticing that the girl at the counter still seemed a little distant in response to her earlier brusqueness, she waved the flyer again and said: ‘I think I’ll do it, you know. You’re right, it’s a game. My husband would have liked the idea.’
‘Thass nice,’ said the girl, mollified.
‘He loved the sea, you see,’ said Julia. ‘Joe always used to say that when we got a bit richer we’d get a boat and sail across the North Sea. He used to read those children’s books. Arthur Ransome, I think it was.’
‘Lovelee,’ said the girl. ‘D’you want a record card then? Only they’re at the main desk now, we’ve run out.’
Two days later, on the far side of several nightmares and an embarrassing, pity-laden interview with Human Resources, Julia came back. She had, with customary thoroughness, made a study of the public swimming times and identified seven to nine in the morning and eight to nine in the evening as the most congenial opportunity: over-16s only, strictly lane swimming. Lowering herself into the soup-warm water in her frumpish costume she shuddered a little, breathing in the scent of chlorine, contemplating the idea of 7,400 lengths with little enthusiasm. But the water upheld her – she had forgotten how comforting, how womblike was that feeling, how pleasant to feel the middle-aged flabbiness of one’s breasts and midriff being surrounded and supported by the uncritical element. After a few tentative strokes she found her legs remembering the shape of kicks and her cupped hands grasping at the water ahead of her. Breaststroke, crawl – ah yes, and that comforting sidestroke her father had taught her. And backstroke, yes. Two ways to do it. Either with the arms wind-milling high and fast, or just flapping gently at her side.
She did a length in each style, making five; a little out of breath, she clung to the rail, keeping apart from the fast swimmers who made a swishing turn and powered off to the far end in half her time. Blinking water from her stinging eyes, she resolved to get goggles. Because she now knew for certain that this would go on. Yes, it would go on. ‘To the very brink,’ she muttered to herself as she padded to the changing room and got her card stamped for fifteen lengths. She would swim this virtual North Sea, morning and evening, and win her right to cross the real one. No Charon for her, demanding coin and setting Cerberus growling. She would swim her own Styx, at her own speed.
‘Feeling comfortable?’ said the pudgy young doctor a fortnight later. ‘Sleeping well?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia, surprised at herself. ‘I didn’t at first. I had nightmares. But now I go swimming in the evening, and it tires me out.’
‘Jolly good.’
There seemed nothing else to be said between them, but as she reached the door Julia turned and said, ‘I’m only three miles out, of course. Nautical miles. But it means I’m in among the approach channel buoys now.’ Not pausing to see his astonished face, she left, almost laughing. She was having tea with Sally later when she enlarged on this theme.
‘I’m really looking forward to the East Shipwash, and when I get to the Inner Gabbard I’ll feel I’ve achieved something.’
‘Where did you get the map?’ asked Sally, who – still in ignorance of the reason for it – had been following her friend’s theoretical adventure with incredulous amusement. She gestured to the kitchen wall in the little flat, where a blue-and-green nautical chart was pinned up and showed a few small black Xs in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘It looks like a proper big ship chart.’
‘It is. I went to a chandlery place, where Joe used to go and look wistfully at all the boat stuff,’ said Julia. ‘It’s quite interesting. I got a booklet to go with it because I didn’t understand the abbreviations. You’d think
the sea was just empty, but there are all these buoys and lightships and things, and marks about how deep the bottom is. When I get to about three thousand lengths I’ll be in a busy shipping channel, quite dangerous, actually. Then at 7,440 lengths exactly, I’ll probably swim just about underneath the Maas West oil platform.’
‘You’re bats,’ said Sally. ‘If you want to go on the ferry, the foot-passenger ticket only costs about thirty quid. I’ll come with you. We’ll do a weekend and go to the Van Gogh museum. No need to turn into a prune trying to swim it.’
‘I want to,’ said Julia. ‘We all do. There are quite a few of us, you know, queuing up at that desk every evening to declare our lengths. We get quite competitive.’
‘How many can you do at one go?’
‘I topped out at forty lengths. That’s a kilometre. Some of them go on for ages and do about sixty, but I get tired – the drugs—’ Julia broke off and moved on hastily to safer ground, mortified at having nearly told her friend the truth. ‘I mean, for my asthma. But I think it does me good. Umm – have you seen much of your boys lately? How did Adam’s job interview go?’
As the weeks went by, the swimming sessions took on ever more importance, growing longer as Julia’s stamina increased. Morning and evening were no longer enough. After three months, just as she was approaching the shipping separation channel in the Noord Hinder Precautionary Area, Julia went to Human Resources and invoked her right to invalidity leave.
‘I can’t tell you how sorry we are to lose you,’ said the HR chief. ‘But you must do whatever’s best. You’re actually . . .’ He hesitated, noting the thinning of her hair. ‘Looking rather well, considering.’
‘I take exercise,’ said Julia briefly. ‘Anyway, I’ve left a long handover document. Eleanor has it.’
Walking away from the last job of her life, she reflected in the lift, would seem more sombre and momentous a parting if it were not for the possibility that tonight she would almost definitely be level with the Noord Hinder Racon. It was only another half a nautical mile, thirty-five lengths. She was well over halfway across now. After long, blank blue weeks of keeping the faith and watching the pencil marks crawl across the kitchen chart, she would soon be out of the emptiness of mid-ocean and back in the shallow water, in among the winking channel buoys, kicking and squirming through warm chlorine and imaginary salt waves towards Hoek van Holland and the edge of a new world.
‘O my America, my new found land,’ she murmured. Joe used to quote Donne to her when they were first married, innocents tasting with incredulous joy the secure pleasures of bedtime. She had only five years with him before the accident and had lived thirty years since, each year more senior at work and sensible at home, more grown-up and reasonable and responsible and lonely. Why had she forgotten the dreams they had together? Why had she not followed them? Taken sailing lessons, travelled, signed up for one of those alarming round-the-world adventures that other middle-aged women were always doing in the newspapers.
‘Didn’t want to, I suppose,’ she said aloud. ‘He had the dreams. I just followed on. Well, Joe’ – she was at the door of the swimming pool now, holding the towel bag without which she never left home – ‘I’m coming now. Another fifteen miles.’ The assistant on the front desk knew her, and her increasingly noticeable habit of talking to herself. She smiled in professional welcome.
‘Fifteen miles, did you say? Getting close!’
‘Yes. Has anybody got all the way yet?’
‘Mr Blakemore. He was first. Oooh, he was pleased. He went over with his wife last weekend. Apparently it was ever so rough.’
‘I shan’t mind.’
‘You could always leave it till spring. There isn’t a time limit, is there?’
‘I don’t want to wait. I want to cross the North Sea and look out and know that I swam all that distance. I swam it!’
Julia put down her money, reflecting that as from next week she would get in for 70p as ‘unwaged’ and that it was surprising how little she minded that indignity. Minutes later, limbs heavy and heart light, she was swimming slowly under the bright neon, alone in her roped-off lane, and the water heaved with her dizzy breathlessness and seemed already salt in her eyes.
On the edge of the pool the young lifeguard watched her; incurious, magnificent in his strong young body. It was his gap year, and he was serving his time in this job to pay for his travels. The slow-moving, earnest old woman in the baggy costume might have been from a different species. Keen-eyed under the bright lights, the boy saw very little.
THE NAIAD
SARAH WHITELEY
MY JOURNEY TO the sea began when I was tiny. My mum, who used to surf in the 1960s, would sit me on one of her old boards and push me into the little breakers in about six inches of water, and we both soon realised I had an insatiable appetite for the waves, an appetite that has never really gone away. We moved to Saunton in Devon when I was nine, and from then on I’d quite literally roll down the garden into the sea: living on the beach is something you never take for granted if you surf, and opening the curtains in the morning to the sea, long perfect lines of swell rolling into the bay creating beautiful peeling waves, still has the same effect on me now as it did then.
Learning to surf in Saunton Sands in the late 1980s was great. The boys were surfing with their nine-foot-plus long-boards, and the atmosphere was mellow, and being the only girl in the water never bothered me because I’ve always been a tomboy, forever trying to keep up with an elder brother who was exceptionally good at sports. So there I was, a tiny whippersnapper, itching to better my surfing and loving every minute that I spent in the water; watching other surfers and looking out for new moves. I was surfing four times a day in the summer holidays, before school and after school through the winter months in temperatures of as low as 7 degrees. French, English or Keen As – yes, I was mustarded right up. And I just couldn’t get enough of the sea – it draws you in, and when that happens your life completely changes.
And then things started to get competitive. I was tackling more challenging waves, faster, more powerful and more dangerous, but I was gaining confidence and building up my experience, and it was really satisfying seeing myself improving. And that’s when the boys started to notice me, and they weren’t too sure how to handle it. They seemed to think along the lines of: ‘She’s only a girl – she won’t make the wave, so I’ll catch it and it won’t be wasted.’ And I realised it was going to take some time to convince this new set of wave warriors that girls can hold their own in the waves. But over time, and after a few tricky moments, I made some good friends and mutual respect blossomed, which felt really good. And when I started pulling off some good moves on my surfboard and throwing a bit of spray on the waves, they started to take me seriously and give me a bit of credit, so that by the time I was going out when the surf was really big, they would help me out by shouting me into waves. They knew I wasn’t messing about and that I was going for it out there.
And then things started to get really interesting. When I was sixteen, Tim Heyland, from a local surf shop, barked at me in his army corporal voice: ‘Oi, Whiteley, English Nationals, Woolacombe, if you come in the top three I’ll sponsor you.’ And since I reckoned I had nothing to lose, I gave it a try. And I won, much to my surprise, and that was the start of my competition career, and I entered every national surfing competition over the next ten years. Contest surfing can be extremely frustrating, since you can never guarantee waves at a certain time on a certain day, and there’s vast amounts of waiting, hanging around for your heats. I’ve spent many an hour feeling increasingly queasy, sitting in damp clothes trying to focus beyond the windscreen wipers and steamy glass. And then the next morning it’s back to work and back to training, which usually involved a soft sand run up the beach, followed by a severe beating of a punch bag and a painful medley of sit-ups. Maybe a paddle to Croyde on my longboard if the surf was flat, but usually I’d be surfing come rain or shine, through huge and mini waves,
and the odd gale.
One of my happiest achievements was winning the Junior European Championships in Portugal when I was eighteen, followed by winning the biggest grin award too. I was on the British team twice for the World Championships, and team trips like those are fantastic to be involved with. There were three of us who would regularly make most of the finals, so we had a healthy amount of rivalry and in turn we each had a slice of the winner’s cake. In the early days the standard of women’s surfing was pretty average, but these days there are some tremendous women surfers around, and we’re definitely not just sitting on the beach in our bikinis watching the boys any more; we’re out there doing it, and catching up rapidly. Especially with the likes of Layne Beachley around, six times and current world champion, to name but one. My personal favourite was Lisa Anderson for the US, who was one of the most influential female surfers to take the standard to the next level, and she notched up five world titles along the way. And Robyn Davies, our home-grown talent from Helston, Cornwall, has been putting in some impressive performances, battling it out with the pros on the WQS tour (World Qualifying Series).
Surfing has taken me to some amazing places: Indonesia, Hawaii, Fiji, Sri Lanka and the States, to mention a few, and I always spent the bulk of the winter in Manly, Sydney. One trip that sticks out was to New Zealand. I cannot describe how stunning this country is, so diverse: lush rainforests, crispy beaches, silent mountains. The place is tops, and the people are too. Another hot spot would have to be Ireland. Uncrowded surf, Guinness, seafood chowder, Irish bread. Perfect. And Fuerteventura has turned into another haunt; there are some great waves to be had along the north track, point after point of perfect rollers. And the Maldives were pretty amazing too, where the most wonderful waves peel past the tiny atoll of Lohifushi. On one particular occasion the surf had picked up and the other residents of the island had scarpered from the water, except for one longboarder called Brian from Salcombe in south Devon, and me. And I remember catching some of the best waves of my life, in the most beautiful surroundings, translucent sea, wearing only board shorts and a rash vest. Heaven. And Fiji is pretty extraordinary as well, although the rips were really hard work when we were surfing the outer islands. Paddling back out to catch wave after wave seemed to take for ever as the current keeps pulling you back in the opposite direction, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the colour of the sea there. It transfixes you; it’s got to be the most beautiful blue in the world.
