always climbed down gingerly, shivering as she teased him. Alison watched the man, with his back to her, as he looked into the freezing water, then suddenly let his body fall with a splash. She shuddered, and panicked when there seemed no sign of his head reappearing. The plunge pool was seven foot deep, with a ladder going only half way down.
She looked around but nobody else was paying any attention. She had taken a step towards the plunge pool when his head resurfaced, spraying out drops of water as he shook his hair like a drenched dog. He turned, catching sight of her and nodded again. Alison found herself looking away as if caught spying. She dived into the adult pool, shivering but then enjoying its childfree waters. She swam towards the deep end, as far as possible from his eyes. She couldn’t be sure if her sense of still being watched was instinct or paranoia.
Alison swam lengths until her arms ached, then discreetly checked that the children weren’t missing her. A young mother held a crying baby in the crowded pool, glaring angrily towards the sauna, obviously waiting for her overdue husband. Alison smiled, imagining the reception that awaited him. Joan spied her and waved her away again. She checked the clock, allowing herself ten minutes before getting the kids changed for lunch.
The teenage Dublin girls had just arrived in bikinis and dived in unison into the adult pool. They climbed out again to repeat the exercise, in case any man present had missed it. Their father was heading into the sauna with the RTE executive who had cornered Peadar last night. She imagined them ladling more water onto the hot coals, anxious to outdo each other in the macho stakes as they discussed horsepower, horse–trading and horse shit.
She chose the steam room instead which was empty or at first appeared to be. She stretched out on the upper tier of hot tiles, adjusting her bathing costume, and stared up at the slow drip–drip of water converging and falling from the corners of tiles in the curved roof. It took several moments for her eyes to adjust to the steam and for the blurred outline of a man sitting against the far wall to register. She knew without being able to distinguish any features that it was him. Alison cursed herself for picking the steam room, then became angry. She had often shared this space with men before without it costing her a thought. If he was a voyeur that was his problem not hers. Besides he couldn’t get more steamed up than he was already. Alison lay back, closed her eyes and decided to ignore him.
‘They say five minutes in here earns you five years off purgatory.’ His voice broke the silence, as if he knew she had only now become aware of him. Alison made a non–committal noise, hoping to discourage him. But he laughed instead, wryly and familiarly. ‘We could have used some of this heat, stuck out at night in that mobile library in Skerries.’
Alison lay perfectly still. Mentally she checked her bathing costume, the state of her hair, a half dozen inconsequential things as she tried to place his voice. She felt naked, stripped of her anonymity. It was twenty years since she had briefly worked in the mobile libraries. She opened her eyes and tried to peer across through the steam.
‘Do I know you?’ she asked.
‘A different time, Ali, a different world.’
How long was it since anyone called her Ali? The nickname had only been used by a handful of people. It was a brief benchmark of freedom at eighteen when she got her first job away from Waterford. The mobile libraries were a stopgap until she started training as a nurse the following April. Everyone working there had a pet name that summer. The three lads sharing the top table all called themselves Harold. ‘Is Harold in yet, Harold?’ ‘No, I haven’t seen him, Harold.’ Betty was known as Sheila because she wanted to emigrate to Australia. Sharon was called Lucy because she phoned in sick to smoke dope in her bedsit and watch reruns of Here’s Lucy – a programme she swore she hated but not as much as she hated work. The nickname Ali had suited Alison back then, the bright sparkle of it as she floated like a butterfly through late–night library parties in bedsits.
In Dublin, being called Ali made her feel different from the child she became again when she took the train home each weekend. That’s what nicknames did, made you part of something special. It was why Peadar renamed her Alison within weeks of them meeting that summer, like her real name had turned full circle to become an intimate term of endearment between them. But she felt flustered in the steam room now and knew the man could sense it, because his voice changed, growing almost apologetic.
‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ he said. ‘I saw you last night and couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew you hadn’t a clue who I was. You mightn’t remember me anyway. But, of course, the beard doesn’t help, or the absence of it. You used to joke that at twenty I looked forty with it and at forty I’d shave it off and look twenty again.’
‘Chris?’
Good Christ, she thought, not Chris Conway here, all of a slap, in the steam room at Fitzgerald’s. Chris had never needed a nickname. A manic explosion of jokes and gestures, he always stood out simply as Chris.
‘You’ve barely changed, Ali. You must have a portrait of yourself growing old in your attic.’
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