The Swim Club Read online

  She sits down and reaches for her knickers. ‘Try as I will, I can’t see anything positive that could ever come out of this.’

  I’m with her there. The advantages aren’t exactly thick on the ground.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says, dropping her voice very low, ‘I think I see him in the distance, or standing with his back to me in the street. I approach, he turns around and it’s not him, not like him at all, except vaguely the fair hair or the height. Yet at first glance I’m so sure it’s him.’

  All of a sudden Karen’s looking squeezed and shrunken again, like she did at Adam’s funeral. We all cluster round. Laura, sitting down beside her, says, ‘That’s very normal. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t happening.’

  She brightens a little. ‘Really? I thought you’d all think I was mad.’

  ‘Mad – you?’ I’m genuinely startled by her words. ‘You’re one of the sanest, strongest people I’ve ever met. Look at you – the most devastating thing happened, yet two months later you’re out participating. Battered and bruised, but getting on.’

  ‘And for the record,’ Laura tells her. ‘I do believe that good sometimes comes out of not so good things if you really work at it.’

  The rest of us might be free with opinion and quick with advice, but Laura is always deemed particularly worth listening to, given that she’s a doctor who sorts people out on a daily basis.

  Listening to her now, and seeing the flicker of optimism on Karen’s face, seeing Wendy’s nods of agreement, I feel a spark of something building. So this might be a weird place for counselling sessions – a shabby fibro changing room with enough rising damp stains on the walls to make me wonder if the pool has sprung a leak – but I’ve got a comfortable sense of having discovered a refuge, a place for confidences. I’ve no doubt at all that our commitment to the pool is the start of something good.

  The next day my neck and shoulders are so stiff I can hardly turn my head. The only bits of me not hurting are my legs. Once more they carry me to impressive speed with a kickboard. But actual swimming, I’m fast discovering, relies so much more on good arms than good legs. I struggle through the session then limp into the changing room, my arms hanging like sacks of dead meat at my sides.

  Wendy, bracing as a youth-camp leader, says, ‘Second up is always the hardest. Tomorrow it’ll be easier.’

  ‘It was the same for me,’ admits Karen. She’s under the shower, putting conditioner through her hair. Deafened by the water, she’s shouting a little. ‘Jelly arms within minutes. Weak as a kitten.’

  Limp jelly she might be, but she’s looking better than yesterday, not quite as drooped and lost. She finishes her hair and wanders over to the benches. ‘If we’re going to have to parade from here to the pool and back in our togs every morning, I suppose I should do something about these.’ She bends down, examining the black tufts defiantly escaping the legs of her swimsuit.

  ‘Child scarers,’ says Laura.

  We all start examining our own. Mine aren’t too bad. It’s not often I discover an advantage in being a pale, Nordic type at the mercy of tropical Queensland. Wendy’s are second best. Karen’s, we decide, are the worst. ‘My Italian grandmother,’ she laments.

  ‘They’ll get worse as you get older,’ Laura warns her. ‘Like men losing hair on their head and growing it in their ears and nostrils instead. It’ll be spreading down to our knees by the time we’re fifty.’

  We decide to make urgent waxing appointments.

  ‘You should go and see Elsa,’ suggests Wendy. ‘She’s new in town. I’ve only been twice, but she did a good job on my legs … Though you wouldn’t want to go on a Monday,’ she adds, and there’s a mischievous gleam in her eye that hints at interesting revelations. Clearly Elsa is not simply closed on a Monday.

  ‘Why not?’ comes the inevitable chorus. ‘What’s wrong with a Monday?’

  ‘Monday,’ says Wendy, wringing out her wet togs, ‘is when Elsa holds her rebirthing clinic.’

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘Rebirthing. You know, reliving the moment of your birth. I walked in, not realising, and saw half a dozen disciples lying on the floor wrapped in blankets, moaning their heads off.’

  ‘Were they cold?’ asks Karen.

  Laura’s face is alight with laughter, and I figure she knows plenty that we don’t know. I catch Karen’s eye. ‘I think we should demand an explanation.’

  ‘Definitely!’ Karen turns on Laura. ‘Out with it.’

  ‘It’s all about undoing birth trauma,’ Laura tells us. ‘They curl up in a foetal position, tightly swathed in a blanket. Simulating the environment of the womb. The tighter the better. Not much space in a birth canal.’

  I stare at her. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s not so different to what we’re doing: a bunch of women getting together, having a joint purpose to feel better about themselves. A couple of my patients go. One woman swears it cured her claustrophobia.’

  ‘No shortage of weirdos in our town,’ I mutter. Then, ‘Actually, I’m surprised they haven’t been chasing you yet, Karen. Quite a few approached me after Alec disappeared. Psychic healing. Aura cleansing.’

  Karen smiles. ‘Not my sort of thing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Aromatherapy might be,’ suggests Wendy. ‘You should try it.’

  ‘Mm. Sounds soothing.’

  ‘It is. You’d love it.’

  If anyone deserves soothing it’s got to be Karen. She’s always bright enough here at the pool, but I can’t believe there aren’t plenty of dark moments when she’s at home surrounded by memories of Adam. Trying to be brave for the kids.

  ‘How are the kids doing?’ I ask her, hoping my question doesn’t probe tender nerves.

  ‘They’re good,’ she says. ‘Amazingly good. Though sometimes I worry they’re saving it up for a crash at a later date.’

  ‘Unlikely.’ Laura’s pulled everything out of her bag, rearranging in vain to make it all fit. ‘Kids are astonishingly resilient and ultimately selfish,’ she says as she restuffs. ‘If they’re getting fed and having lots of extra attention from the wider family circle, they’ll do much better than you.’

  ‘You should focus on you,’ I say. ‘If you’re well, others depending on you will be well.’

  She sits down to dry between her toes – an essential activity, we’ve been told, if we want to avoid the scourge of the communal shower: fungal infections that rot air-deprived skin. There’s a visible improvement in her since yesterday, an unfurling of the tightness. ‘I am well,’ she says. ‘Reasonably well. Mum and Dad are over every day before I come to the pool, and don’t go home till I’ve put the kids to bed, which makes so much difference. I know I’m lucky. I know they’re easing things enormously for me. There’s no way I’d be able to swim, or do half the stuff I do without them at home organising everything.’

  She reaches for her bra, fumbling with the clasp. ‘I’m so grateful to them, but there are some things I could never talk to Mum and Dad about, not the way I can to you three. Do you know that after the funeral, and I mean right after, at the wake, when Adam had only been dead five days, that woman from the library at the primary school, do you know the one? The blondish one?’

  We all nod.

  ‘Well, she took me aside and told me to make sure I masturbate.’

  ‘What?’ we explode. ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Yes. And so was she. Said it was essential if I was to maintain my sense of wellbeing. What sense of wellbeing? I wanted to yell. My husband was buried ten minutes ago and you’re telling me to masturbate?’

  ‘I wonder what she’s been reading,’ I say, and lean forward to help Karen with her clasp. ‘There’s some pretty weird books on grief in the Mystic Book Shop up the road. Plenty to choose from.’

  Laura, dressed in her work clothes – sensible lady-doctor navy; no white or pastels, you never know what might get squirted on you in the course of a day – is cramming her cap, goggles and s
wimsuit into a nonexistent space in her bag. ‘Just what you need on top of everything else,’ she says. ‘Doing your best to cope, to hold your kids up as well as yourself, and you have to fend off insensitive maniacs. But as Nietzsche said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. He was a bit of a nutter himself, but those words do have a ring of truth.’

  ‘Children keep you strong too,’ I comment. ‘When you feel like crawling under the nearest table, you can’t if there are kids in the house. You have to at least try to act normal for their sake.’

  ‘True,’ agrees Karen, wriggling into her shorts. ‘It’s amazing how I can hold myself together in front of Jeremy and Lisa. I do most of my crying under the shower.’

  ‘Best place for it,’ says Laura. ‘You don’t waste tissues.’

  She’s rewarded with a quick smile.

  Karen falls silent for a minute, running a comb through her smooth, damp hair. Then her gaze, hesitant at first, almost reluctant, settles on my face. ‘Tell me what it was like, Charlie, when you first found yourself on your own.’

  I should have anticipated this, but I haven’t, and a positive note is going to be hard to strike without due time for rehearsal. There’s no way I’m going to describe The Moment. Alec standing at the door, car keys in his hand. He’s waited till the boys are asleep so he won’t have to be the one to tell them that he’s walking out of their lives, won’t have to face them while delivering his double whammy. First strike: I’m in love with someone else.

  Pow! Me trying to draw breath, to move my lips and form the word Who? But he beats me to it. Second strike. It’s Emma. Emma Lewis. Pow! Instant annihilation of my self-esteem. All gone, nuked in a nanosecond. Then he’s off. Just like that. Leaving me staring out of the open front door, agonisingly conscious of two snug and oblivious boys in their beds.

  Karen doesn’t need to know this. What she needs to know about is the aftermath. ‘It was different to you,’ I say. ‘I had about a week of suspicion, of growing certainty that something major was about to erupt. You were caught totally off guard.’

  ‘Not so different,’ she says. ‘You still found yourself facing life alone with two children to raise.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Only the cause was different. Instead of an accident, it was Alec’s own weakness and poor judgement that took him.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Karen’s dark, expressive eyes are beseeching my honesty, and I realise I’m going to have to say something. ‘Well the first thing I tried to do was stop him,’ I tell her. ‘To my shame I begged him to stay, blamed myself, promised to change, to be better, brighter, more beautiful. He went anyway. The boys asked a lot of awkward questions of course – you’ve met them, you know what a questioning pair they can be – where he was, why he’d gone, didn’t he like living with them, were they too noisy, too naughty, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But what about you?’ Karen persists. ‘How did you cope?’

  I sit down and start lacing up my trainers with excessive thoroughness. I don’t mind talking about this, not after more than two years, but I’m scared of letting Karen see how black and unbearable the first year alone was. How I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. How I shambled round in my pyjamas half the day, didn’t wash my hair, drove miles to a supermarket where I wouldn’t know anyone and then only to do the minimum of shopping, enough so that the twins wouldn’t starve. How I’d try to act normal until the school bus left, then retreat into a hole of my own digging and wallow in self-loathing and hopelessness. ‘It was pretty lonely,’ I admit. ‘Running home to my mother in England was a real temptation for ages. She’s on her own too – widowed – and was champing at the bit to help me raise the boys.’

  ‘It would have been a huge upheaval dragging Mikey and Dan back to England to live,’ says Laura.

  ‘Too big. Their home was here and I had my writing career to worry about. Believe me, though, there were days when I felt so down it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. And I only really managed that because the boys needed me. But it got better.’

  ‘Does Alec visit the boys much?’ Wendy asks.

  Her words surprise me: that anyone might attribute halfnormal behaviour to Alec. Then I remind myself that Wendy’s never met him. ‘No. Not at all. Not once. Vanished in a puff of smoke.’

  Wendy looks up from packing her bag. I can see she’s really startled. ‘But that’s appalling.’

  ‘He’s an arrogant, selfish prick,’ says Laura. ‘Always was. Always will be.’

  She’s the voice of my thoughts. I love her for her loyalty.

  ‘Maybe it’s easier for you not to have any contact with him,’ Karen says to me. ‘I mean, really, would you want to see him?’

  ‘I’d hate it. But for the boys, it would have been a much easier transition. They felt totally abandoned and, as I’ve said before, thought it was their fault that he’d gone.’

  I notice that Wendy has a fleck of angry colour on each tanned cheek. Her serenity and self-control have always seemed intrinsic, like the meticulous stashing of her swimbag, and the neat hair and ironed clothes. I wonder what chord I’ve struck, what bruised tender spot I’ve bumped. ‘I suppose there’s no financial support either?’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘You’re kidding. I’m lucky he didn’t try to slug me for alimony. But this is history now. I’m managing just fine and, most importantly, the boys are well adjusted and happy. Life’s good.’ I glance at Karen and give her what I hope is a reassuring smile: a smile that promises light at the end of any tunnel, however deep a black hole of a tunnel it might be. ‘And there are some compensations in being husbandless.’

  ‘Such as?’ asks Karen

  ‘I get to watch re-runs of SeaChange.’

  They all laugh: an instant lightening of the mood.

  ‘True. Alec said it was rubbish and just flicked the channel whenever I tried to put it on.’

  ‘Sounds like a bully,’ says Wendy.

  I suppose he was. But I didn’t realise it at the time. Live with someone like that for years and you come to believe theirs is normal behaviour. Normal for him to use his ready temper to win my compliance, knowing I’d give in any day rather than risk the boys hearing a raised voice. Normal to have to ask permission to use the phone, to drive the car.

  No need to go into that now though. Karen wants to hear what it was like to be alone.

  ‘One thing I noticed, was that when you’re newly single, some people no longer include you in things, don’t invite you to dinners. You’re not part of a couple, you’re an odd one out. Some women see that as a threat. You’re single. Available. They think you’ll be after their husbands.’

  Laura is still trying to organise her bag. I think she needs one of those magic carpet bags – like Mary Poppins had – that never fills up. Everything Laura owns is overflowing with unnecessary stuff. Her bag, her car, her house. She stops stuffing a minute to qualify my argument. ‘Karen has the advantage of you there, Charlie. As a widow, people will see her as a victim of circumstance. A perfect little wife, an innocent. As a divorcee, whose husband did the leaving, your case raises the dreaded question of why.’

  ‘The suspicion that I might have driven him out by being a crap wife.’

  ‘Exactly. Maybe you were a slob. Maybe you were demanding, argumentative and lazy. Maybe you chased other men. Not a saint, at any rate. No husband in his right mind would leave a saint.’

  ‘Then we all know Alec wasn’t in his right mind,’ says Karen, and we giggle. It’s Karen’s first joke. We’re proud of her.

  CHAPTER 5

  ANTONIA STOOD AT THE DOOR, one pale hand upon the latch. ‘Make haste, Meaghan, we must away. Where is my cloak?’

  The young maid snatched a heavy woollen cloak from the closet, and draped it over her mistress’s shoulders with shaking hands.

  Her breath held tight, Antonia opened the chamber door a crack. The passageway was dark but for the low flicker of flame in
a wall sconce some distance behind. ‘Come,’ she whispered.

  The two girls crept along the passageway: mistress and maid, slippered feet silent over the rough, flagstoned floor. Far away a door slammed, the sconce flared and the two hurrying shadows leapt ahead, monstrous and distorted. From somewhere in the recesses of the castle came a raised voice, another door slamming. The girls froze.

  Then they heard the sound of running feet, the heavy, booted feet of many men. ‘Quick,’ urged Antonia, ‘quick, we are almost there.’

  Hurrying on, they reached a low arched door set deep into the thick masonry of the exterior wall of the castle. Antonia closed one small hand over the massive bolt and drew it aside. The door edged open.

  Outside a hawthorn tree grew close to the castle wall, two horses were tethered to its lower branches. Antonia’s breath slid out in relief. ‘James has not let us down. Here, Meaghan, you take this one.’

  The beat of running, hammering boots grew louder, closer.

  ‘Hurry, Meaghan, hurry.’

  Seeing her maid safely mounted, Antonia placed one delicate foot in her own stirrup and swung her leg over the saddle, arranging her wide skirts to sit astride the horse. With a kick of her heels she urged the animal forward.

  The door burst open behind them. There was a shout, then the whistle of an arrow past Antonia’s hair. ‘Quick,’ she cried, ‘you know where to go, Meaghan. Away now!’ Then she kicked her own horse into a full gallop. Ducking and weaving, gripping the animals quivering flanks with her powerful, muscular legs, she cast an anxious glance at poor Meaghan and saw that the maid, not so blessed, was failing to control her mount well. Not for the first time, Antonia thanked God for the gift of her magnificent thighs.

  No, no, no! I fling down the pen and slouch out to the verandah. Yours is not the sort of life you want art to imitate.