feet and side and a sorrowful, all-knowing, all-forgiving look – had been swimming alongside her in the next lane. He’d been doing only a sort of fast dog paddle, but had managed to keep up with her OK. He was trying to tell her how she could swim through her own body and out into the realm of pure spirit … but she said that she hadn’t been able to hear him properly for all his splashing about.
Jesus didn’t come back, but Karen began to sing hymns in the shower, then shaved her head and starved and flagellated herself. ‘All butterflies are crazy, like goalkeepers,’ said Coach. ‘It must do something to the brain.’ They took her away from school, but you didn’t understand why they also felt it necessary to drop her from the team – through it all, her times had been unaffected. Although you did miss her you also felt a certain relief: you breezed the next Nationals at both distances. Sometimes you worried that her madness might have been contagious. To swim out of your body into pure spirit: in those final metres when exhaustion set in and the grey haze descended, you felt as if you might have known all too well what Karen – or Christ – had meant.
The world – as Coach liked to say – was your lobster. You could confirm that all major countries had airports, streets with people and cars, and interchangeable hotels with beds of varying discomfort. And the water was always wet – although some of the pools in Mediterranean countries did have moss or mould growing up the sides. In Spain it was so turbid as to appear bottomless: Coach claimed to have glimpsed the masts and funnels of sunken ships. Your winning grab for the rail nearly broke your wrist: afterwards, measuring the pool, you found it to be twelve centimetres short. ‘Spanish metres must be different,’ said Coach. The water behind the Iron Curtain was always ice-cold, with a rusty taste, as if it had been long-stored in cans. Once, in Prague, something stabbed into your push-off foot on the first turn: pain and shock goaded you into frantic activity. On the third lap you realized that you were swimming back through a rose-pink cloud of your own blood. Desperate, you exploded again, to record your fastest-ever time. When they checked the wall there was no apparent cause: you suspected Coach, who had often speculated about deploying blowpipes or cattle-prods. Doc blinked at the inch-long spine he’d tweezered out of your sole: ‘Medical science confesses itself baffled,’ he said, ‘unless a porcupine was passing by.’ Afterwards, the Czechs presented you with a massive medal of dark wood like a cask-lid, carved with a strange animal – half-bear, half-chicken. ‘It’s a nice place to visit,’ said Coach, as he did about everywhere, ‘but I wouldn’t want to live here.’
In the Europeans you finished fourth, behind two stubbled, steroided East German hulks and a cork-skinned Russian who, pre-race, had been pumped full of oxygen-rich new blood. They snarled at you as if they’d only taken the drugs as a handicap and felt that you were cheating by not cheating. You knew that with an effective testing system you’d have had the gold and, for your subsequent fifth and sixth in the Olympics and World Championships, silver and bronze. ‘You’re just unlucky,’ sighed Coach, ‘in a few years’ time we’ll be able to do it, too.’ Remembering the Russian girl’s face – blank-eyed, drooling – you didn’t feel particularly deprived. At least you’d always done your time, done your time – indeed, you usually improved on it, so that you were regularly defeating yourself. What you really loved was setting records – no, breaking records, smashing them. You had a mental picture of a hovering vinyl round – some music you hated like ‘This Old House’, Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddup You Face’, or Dad’s booming Wagner or Slim’n’Slam 78s – a big black shiny zero that was blotting out the sun … which suddenly exploded into flying shards and grey dust, as if hit by a sniper’s bullet, allowing the light to come flooding through.
At the end of the competitive season the other squad members would fall into heavy, silent depressions, but you were secretly pleased at being able to resume unmediated contact with the water. While they hibernated you embarked on prodigious long-distance swimming programmes. Coach, fearing that you’d lose your edge, was always trying to stop you. ‘You need your speed! Need your speed!’ he kept saying, but to no avail. Fifty miles in twenty-four hours: another disk – the British Endurance record – went smithereening. You were the queen of the Charity Swimathon: most of the Navy had sponsored you at a pound a mile – afterwards they sent a telegram: YOU’VE BANKRUPTED THE FLEET BUT THE FLEET STILL LOVES YOU ANYWAY. They helicoptered you out to an aircraft-carrier for the admiral to present you with a door-sized cardboard cheque. Then the sailors three-cheered you and bore you round in triumph. Even though you felt your swimsuit ride right up at the back, there were no comments or wandering hands – they looked at you without lust, with a sort of bashful reverence. Perhaps all the best men joined the Navy: or was it that the sea’s lulling rhythms had taught them kindness and love? After they’d piped you away you looked back, eyes misting, to see the deck a fluttering mass of white caps, waving.
Coach was at the centre of your world. Despite his sloganizing, sulks and foot-stampings, you all loved him. He knew just when to pressurize and when to slacken off, whether to threaten or cajole. And he was always fun: sometimes you’d slap his spreading pink tonsure, with a sound like a fish hitting a marble slab, and he’d chase you, growling like a bear, flicking at your legs with his blackboard pointer. You knew he was just a big softy by the way he draped his arm around your neck, massaged the stiffness out of your shoulders, gently squeezed your forearm at the end of a really gruelling session. And when you won – or even did your time – he’d hug you so hard that you’d feel you might go right through him and out the other side … and weren’t those tears in his eyes? Dad had strangely stiffened up around your twelfth birthday – no more kisses or sitting on his knee – as if you’d committed some unforgivable crime. On visits home you felt as if you were shrinking, getting colder and colder: Mum’s lap looked as distant and unattainable as Mount Everest. The school doctor had put you on the Pill to regularize your periods for competitions: when Mum found the packet she slapped your face and then, having listened to your tearful explanations, nodded and slapped you again.
In fact, you hardly ever got to see any boys. At meets and championships the only real interaction between Men’s and Women’s teams was a series of practical jokes: your face ached from trying to laugh with everyone else at the apple-pie beds, fire-extinguisher fights or purloined underwear. The male star – your equivalent – was impossibly gangling, ichthycephalic with patchy, lemonish tufts of hair, sandy lashes under thick black brows and eyes that seemed confused and unfocused, like something unborn. Racked by self-consciousness, he hid his raw and acned face, peeling and flaking, behind the ramparts of an upturned batwing collar. At the poolside, stripped, his head would roll into his shoulder like Quasimodo’s, attempting at least to conceal half of his shame. But this was the very thing that you liked about him: the red and gold whorls and rosettes on his grey body made him appear to be in mid-metamorphosis, as if – especially in the patches around his large-areolated nipples and inner thighs – they were forming scales. His name was Tom, the same as the transfigured little sweep in The Water Babies, but you thought of him as The Merman. You knew when he was about to enter the room: a gentle wind seemed to pass across your face. In your dreams you were swimming together, skin to skin, merging. Your eyes never met, you never spoke to each other, but once, at a post-competition disco, your team-mates, sniggering, pushed you together on the dancefloor: ‘Beauty and The Beast’! You danced to one of your favourite records, Steve Arrington’s ‘Feel (So Real)’: Tom’s head was twisting round so far that it almost faced in the wrong direction. You put one hand, then the other on his shoulders – they were ridged, and solid as rock – before you felt the blood from your nose dripping on to your bare feet and you bolted back to your respective groups. You told Mum about him: ‘The shy boys,’ she said, with a glare at Dad, ‘are always the sly boys.’ Coach just put his arms in the teapot position, flared his nostrils like Kenneth Williams and lisped: ‘A little bit that way, I’m afraid, our Thomas.’
On the last day of the Europeans, the night of your sixteenth birthday, you lost what Mum had always called Your Jewel. You’d got properly drunk for the first time, after an evening of party games – Up Jenkyns!, Dumb Crambo, Animal & Stick – spiced with Draconian booze forfeits. Coach helped you to your room, then kissed you, his tongue exploring
