him up. He is so light he comes up easily, gasping for air, eyes wild behind his goggles, a big green snot bubble in his right nostril. He lifts his goggles off his head and empties them of water, grunting, grumbling, his body shaking with rage that I have once again foiled his dastardly plan. His face is purple and his chest heaves up and down as he tries to catch his breath. He reminds me of my three-year-old who always hides in the same place and then gets annoyed when I find him. I don’t say anything, just make my way back to the stool, my flip-flops splashing my calves with cold water. This happens every day. This is all that happens.
‘You took your time there,’ Eric says.
Did I? Maybe a second longer than usual. ‘Didn’t want to spoil his fun.’
Eric smiles against his better judgement and shakes his head to show he disapproves. Before working here with me since the nursing home’s birth, Eric had a previous Mitch Buchannon lifeguard experience in Miami. His mother on her deathbed brought him back home to Ireland and then his mother surviving has made him stay. He jokes that she will outlive him, though I can sense a nervousness on his part that this will indeed be the case. I think he’s waiting for her to die so that he can begin living, and the fear as he nears fifty is that that will never happen. To cope with his self-imposed pause on his life, I think he pretends he’s still in Miami; though he’s delusional, I sometimes envy his ability to pretend he is in a place far more exotic than this. I think he walks to the sound of maracas in his head. He is one of the happiest people I know because of it. His hair is Sun-In orange, and his skin is a similar colour. He doesn’t go on any traditional ‘dates’ from one end of the year to the other, saving himself up for the month in January when he disappears to Thailand. He returns whistling, with the greatest smile on his face. I don’t want to know what he does there but I know that his hopes are that when his mother dies, every day will be like Thailand. I like him and I consider him my friend. Five days a week in this place has meant I’ve told him more than I’ve even told myself.
‘Doesn’t it strike you that the one person I save every day is a person who doesn’t even want to live? Doesn’t it make you feel completely redundant?’
‘There are plenty of things that do, but not that.’ He bends over to pick up a bunch of wet grey hair clogging the drains, which looks like a drowned rat, and he holds on to it, shaking the water out of it, not appearing to feel the repulsion that I do. ‘Is that how you’re feeling?’
Yes. Though it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t matter if the man I’m saving doesn’t want his life to be saved, shouldn’t the point be that I’m saving him? But I don’t reply. He’s my supervisor, not my therapist, I shouldn’t question saving people while on duty as a lifeguard. He may live in an alternative world in his head but he’s not stupid.
‘Why don’t you take a coffee break?’ he offers, and hands me my coffee mug, the other hand still holding the drowned rat ball of pubic hair.
I like my job very much but lately I’ve been antsy. I don’t know why and I don’t know what exactly I’m expecting to happen in my life, or what I’m hoping will happen. I have no particular dreams or goals. I wanted to get married and I did. I wanted to have children and I do. I want to be a lifeguard and I am. Though isn’t that the meaning of antsy? Thinking there are ants on you when there aren’t.
‘Eric, what does antsy mean?’
‘Um. Restless, I think, uneasy.’
‘Has it anything to do with ants?’
He frowns.
‘I thought it was when you think there are ants crawling all over you, so you start to feel like this.’ I shudder a bit. ‘But there aren’t any ants on you at all.’
He taps his lip. ‘You know what, I don’t know. Is it important?’
I think about it. It would mean that I think there is something wrong with my life because there actually is something wrong with my life or that there is something wrong with me. But it’s just a feeling, and there actually isn’t. There not being something wrong would be the preferred solution.
What’s wrong, Sabrina? Aidan’s been asking a lot lately. In the same way that constantly asking someone if they’re angry will eventually make them angry.
Nothing’s wrong. But is it nothing, or is it something? Or is it really that it is nothing, everything is just nothing? Is that the problem? Everything is nothing? I avoid Eric’s gaze and concentrate instead on the pool rules, which irritate me so I look away. You see, there it is, that antsy thing.
‘I can check it out,’ he says, studying me.
To escape his gaze I get a coffee from the machine in the corridor and pour it into my mug. I lean against the wall in the corridor and think about our conversation, think about my life. Coffee finished, no conclusions reached, I return to the pool and I am almost crushed in the corridor by a stretcher being wheeled by at top speed by two paramedics, with a wet Mary Kelly on top of it, her white and blue-veined bumpy legs like Stilton, an oxygen mask over her face.
I hear myself say ‘No way!’ as they push by me.
When I get into the small lifeguard office I see Eric, sitting down in complete shock, his shell tracksuit dripping wet, his orange Sun-In hair slicked back from the pool water.
‘What the hell?’
‘I think she had a … I mean, I don’t know, but, it might have been a heart attack. Jesus.’ Water drips from his orange pointy nose.
‘But I was only gone five minutes.’
‘I know, it happened the second you walked out. I jammed on the emergency cord, pulled her out, did mouth-to-mouth, and they were here before I knew it. They responded fast. I let them in the fire exit.’
I swallow, the jealousy rising. ‘You gave her mouth-to-mouth?’
‘Yeah. She wasn’t breathing. But then she did. Coughed up a load of water.’
I look at the clock. ‘It wasn’t even five minutes.’
He shrugs, still stunned.
I look at the pool, then at the clock. Mr Daly is sitting on the edge of the pool, looking after the ghost of the stretcher with envy. It was four and a half minutes.
‘You had to dive in? Pull her out? Do mouth-to-mouth?’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Look, don’t beat yourself up about it, Sabrina, you couldn’t have got to her any faster than I did.’
‘You had to pull the emergency cord?’
He looks at me in confusion over this.
I’ve never had to pull the cord. Never. Not even in trials. Eric did that. I feel jealousy and anger bubbling to the surface, which is quite an unusual feeling. This happens at home – an angry mother irritated with her boys has lost the plot plenty of times – but never in public. In public I suppress it, especially at work when it is directed at my supervisor. I’m a measured, rational human being; people like me don’t lose their temper in public. But I don’t suppress the anger now. I let it rise close to the surface. It would feel empowering to let myself go like this if I wasn’t so genuinely frustrated, so completely irritated.
To put it
