have to be a member or anything, you just have to pay a small per-use fee. You have to be careful with timing of course. Sometimes it’s not open access, it’s booked up by clubs or schools. Or some days, especially on warm days, it can be very busy, and after-school hours can be filled with noisy kids. This time of day, though, is usually perfect, and when I got there I was cheered up greatly by the fact that there were only a handful of people in the changing room, and all of them seemed to be getting dressed, having finished their swims.
I love to swim. I always have. It calms me, soothes me. I don’t really know what it is about it that has such a positive effect on me, but it’s not unusual I suppose. It’s sensual of course – being almost naked, surrounded by warm water; and it’s exercise, the only exercise I get really; and it’s also the only physical activity that I do relatively well. Perhaps it was for all these fairly mundane but sensible reasons that I decided to go for a swim. But I remember wondering, as I undressed, whether it wasn’t something as well to do with the rain I’d seen from the café during lunch with Michael. I wondered whether what I was actually doing was attempting to reassert myself over the element. As if I needed to reassure myself that I had the measure of it, that I had it tamed, that I could be a master of water – that it was, after all, only water, and that it was there for me to use and enjoy and not to fear. The thought made me laugh as I stepped beneath the lukewarm shower and slipped my goggles over my head. Then I made my way carefully through to the poolside, thinking that mine is a daft psychology, and that I would make K laugh later that evening with an account of my redemptive exorcism down at the sports centre.
There was a middle-aged woman swimming slow, sedate lengths, and a young girl and her father, clinging to the side, chatting. They were all in the slow lane, and there was no one else. I had never known the pool to be so empty. I think I probably grinned as I walked to the middle lane at the deep end. I nodded to the bored-looking lifeguard slumped in his high chair and asked him if it was all right if I dived in. He nodded, unconcerned. Normally I ease myself into the pool, most of the time I use one of the ladders at the sides, and then swim to the middle lane. But I felt today that the more exuberantly I took the opportunity to enjoy myself, the better I would be able to clear my head of all my concerns and my worries.
I dived. I’m not a great diver, but still, I dived this dive well, and my body went into the water as it should do – hands, arms, shoulders, head, chest, and then the rest of me, slicing into the water neatly, quickly, cleanly. It was a good dive. Something has to go through your mind at a moment like that. It is like a moment of violence almost – like a knife into skin, or the moment of an accident. It is heightened. I mean, things go through our minds all the time, endlessly, but there are certain moments when the thought gets caught, amplified, recorded. It’s like someone takes a photograph. And always, after that, you remember what it was you were thinking when whatever happened happened. When your car hit the kerb; when you lost your footing; when you heard the news; when you heard the bang; the moment you jumped; the moment you dived. I’m not saying that anything other than the dive happened. I just mean that a dive into a swimming pool, as you force your body to trust your brain – if you’re not used to doing it – is just such a moment. As with a trauma moment, the shock, or the adrenalin, or whatever it is, captures your thought and shows it to you in rare clarity, and stores it with those other heightened moments and their associated thoughts. And when I dived into the swimming pool that day, the thought I caught myself thinking was this one: the stain was shaped like Australia.
It was what Michael had said, when he told me about the building ghost. That there was a stain on the carpet of the fourth floor and it wouldn’t go away and it was shaped like Australia. I couldn’t remember really what emphasis he’d given it, if any, and didn’t even know whether it was accurate or something he’d added himself as an evocative phrase, not knowing in truth what the stain looked like at all, thinking that it would assist me in visualising something. And perhaps he’d chosen Australia just because it has a distinctive shape, and also because it suggests something of considerable scale. You don’t really think of something shaped like Australia as being small. At least, I don’t. If it was something that someone had actually said to him, that had been reported to him as an accurate description, and which he had in turn reported accurately to me, did that mean that it was accurate in fact? That the stain really did look like Australia? Perhaps someone earlier in the reporting chain had added it as an embellishment, Chinese-whisper-style, and it had stuck. It might have been the person who told the story to Michael, or it might have been the person before that; it could in fact have been anyone at all in the chain, at any point, close to the original source or not. Even if it had been applied by one of the people who had actually been in the building, who had been to the fourth floor and had seen the stain on the carpet there – even then, how accurate was it? Shapes are fairly objective things, once you get past circles and squares and triangles. One person can look at a cloud and see the outline of a face. A second person can look at the same cloud and see the shape of a sailboat. A third person can look at the same cloud and see nothing but a cloud – shapeless, meaningless and fleeting. Even if you were to assume that several people had seen the stain and that they had all agreed that its shape resembled that of Australia, could it not be said that all stains, almost inevitably, look like Australia? It’s something about the large irregular blob-ness of it, with the single separate smaller blob underneath, Tasmania. Knock your cup of coffee and have a look at the resulting mess. From some angle, somehow, it will look a little like Australia.
I don’t know why all of this suddenly seemed so important, but it did. I realised it with a sort of annoyance, a kind of underwater sigh of impatience, and a slight tilting of the head and a brief rolling of the eyes, as I dived down into the deep brightness of the pool, which felt to me less warm than I thought it should have, but which was, nevertheless, wonderfully refreshing. I knew that I’d have to call Michael and find out whether it was true, whether it was definitely the case that the stain on the fourth-floor carpet of the BOX building was shaped like Australia. I felt it was vital that I find this out, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t asked him at the time. My body was fully immersed by then. I was pointing downwards, head first, towards the bottom of the pool, still moving, and all the water seemed to panic around me, as if I was a catastrophe here. It seemed terribly significant – the matter of Australia, I mean. Significant in terms of what, I had no idea, and why it should occur to me that it was significant I had no idea either. But there was something in the notion of Australia. It wasn’t about the stain per se, or the idea that it remained, despite constant attempts to remove it. What was significant, if it was true, was its shape. I’ve never been to Australia. I know some Australians of course – it’s inevitable – but it’s not a country I know very much about or have very much interest in. And I did not know at that time, I think, what I could or would do with the knowledge – if it was forthcoming from Michael – that the stain was indeed, definitely and clearly and objectively, shaped like Australia. But I knew I had to find out.
My momentum slowed. I kicked my legs briefly and did a quick breaststroke to keep myself going down. Why did I want to keep going down? I suppose I was exhilarated by the water, by being out of the world for a moment, by being so completely and alertly elsewhere. But really – the bottom of a swimming pool is a terrible place. There are tricks and corners there. There are hidden catches. There is the noise. The pool in the sports centre is white-tiled. It has black lane markers – elongated Is that attempt a kind of orientation, and fail, or fail me at least, providing only a mild sense of vertigo and a vague disappointment at the impossibility of falling. There is a slope in the middle somewhere, as the deep end becomes the shallow end. There are randomly spaced plastic covers over drains or filters or some such. There are the shadows of the lane ropes and their measured-out floaters, bobbing. There is the water: bubbles and distortions, glints of light, minute clouds of particles, debris, human dust, debris. We are disintegrating. Sometimes the sparkle of an earring or an unmissed bracelet or an unreachable delicate chain with cross or locket or twist. I don’t think I had been to the bottom of the sports centre pool before. And I think it was only when I reached it, my hands spreading out to brush the tiles, my body contracting, my feet tucking in, my eyes all around me, that I remembered how terrifying such a place is. My fingers
