The possibility of water - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Chris Womersley

I struggled with the retracting mechanism for several minutes, but it seemed to be locked by a metal ratchet or something. It was difficult to see. I felt mildly ill and there was the tart flavour of bile in my mouth. Perhaps I'd eaten some dodgy takeaway food, but I couldn't remember eating anything at all that day. Maybe some toast for breakfast. Perhaps that was it. I stood and kicked at the wheel thing to try to dislodge the ratchet, but to no avail. I was rapidly sobering up – not a desirable state to encounter at such an inconvenient time – and I tried, with rising panic, to remember whether I had any alcohol at home.

I straightened up and lit a cigarette. A breeze ruffled my hair and chilled the sweat on my neck. On it came the smell of diesel fumes from Alexandra Parade. Eli was nowhere to be seen and I doubted I would be able to figure out the stupid tarpaulin mechanism. The whole swimming thing was losing its appeal. ‘Eli,' I hissed. ‘Eli.' No answer. Fuck. Where was she? I searched the shapes and shadows of the darkness.

The tarpaulin buckled at around the centre of the 50-metre pool. I squatted down and looked across the plastic surface, which shimmered slightly in the moonlight in a parody of water. Another movement. A muffled cry. Her voice. Eli's voice. Shit. She was under the tarpaulin. The dumb bitch had gone swimming under the tarpaulin. There's no way she could find her way out of there, under-15 swimming champion or not. Especially not drunk and stoned. Shit. I ran back and forth at the deep end, calling to her, thinking maybe I could guide her towards the edge of the pool. I stepped on to the raised edge, then off. Sweat salted into my eyes. I barked my shin against a banana lounge. Should I go in? Again the lumpy punch from beneath the tarpaulin, this time at least a little closer to the edge. I called out her name, told her to keep going in the same direction. What a disaster. I imagined the police, the headlines, jail, my entire life telescoped into a single tiny, idiotic point.

Then there she was, just a metre away, peering out from beneath a cowl of blue plastic. She was laughing and motioning me to be quiet. ‘There's no fucking water.' And she raised the tarpaulin high over her head to show me. Sure enough, a square cave, its neon-blue floor bruised here and there with middens of leaves.

‘Jesus. I thought you'd gone swimming under there,' I said.

‘What, you think I'm an idiot?'

‘You scared the crap out of me.'

‘No such luck.' She scratched her nose and looked behind her. ‘You get that tarp thing working?'

‘But there's no water.'

Eli stared at me as if measuring me for something. Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead and I could feel her breath on my knee. She held out her hand and I helped her from the shallow end. Together we figured out the tarpaulin mechanism, which wasn't so complicated, and rolled it back, releasing the perfume of warm plastic and old chlorine trapped in there for god knows how long, distilled from a thousand summer days. Neither of us spoke as we bent to the task, which was curiously satisfying, a sort of double-handed rolling. Eli didn't say anything the whole time. She was filled with some sort of weird energy all of a sudden, like she was on a mission.

When we had finished, she strolled the length of the pool, stooping here and there to trail her fingers in the imaginary water, shaking her hand dry each time, and when she got to the shallow end she shrugged off her white shirt, stepped from her jeans and just stood there in her underwear. It wasn't fancy underwear like I thought she would wear, swiped no doubt from David Jones, but just plain blue underwear, practical, like from a Target catalogue. She just stood there, skin glowing, rubbing one hand over the opposite arm. After a few minutes she approached the curling metal ladder, turned around and stepped backwards, rung by rung, into the water.

‘You going to join me?' She made a whooshing sound with her mouth as she breast-stoked around the shallow end. ‘It's nice when you get used to it.' And laughed with the ridiculousness of it, that thing Australians say to encourage their friends to join them the water.

Unsure of what exactly I was doing, I wandered down to the shallow end and sat on the lip of the pool. Eli watched me from the corner of her eye as she swam. I swung around and dangled my feet into the pool.

‘Careful,' she said. ‘You'll get your shoes wet. Don't want wet shoes, you'll catch your death. You can't swim in your clothes, everyone knows that. You'll drown.' I hesitated, about to say how unlikely that was, when she came up beside me and rested on the edge of the pool, elbows winged on either side of her. ‘Come on,' she whispered. ‘I'll give you those lessons. But we'd better stay in the shallow end. After all that drinking, and if you're not such a good swimmer and all.'

By the time I'd taken off my jeans and t-shirt and kicked off my shoes, it didn't seem so foolish to be swimming around with Eli in Fitzroy Pool in the middle of the night. She stood beside me with one hand cupped under my chest and observed my freestyle with a professional eye. ‘No. Your arm is going way too loose coming out of the water. All over the place. Try and drag your fingertips along the surface of the water – the hand that's coming around – so you get that clean action, like this, see? Be with the water. That's it. Yes. Nice and tight. Feel that weightlessness? That's what you want.'

I don't know how long we spent paddling about in that damn pool, grinning like seals, kicking up the swirls of leaves, but it was the most fun I'd had in years – made sweeter, of course, by the fact that I knew it couldn't last. I felt I was somehow unbound from myself. Eventually we scrambled out of the pool and, suddenly shy, stepped into our street clothes, into the other, public versions of ourselves, before climbing back over the fence into the adjacent parkland.

We wandered back to her squat that smelled of sour milk. She had the front room. We smoked for a while in the sallow light from the streetlights outside before falling asleep fully clothed as trucks lumbered past. In the night I felt her childish breath against my neck and finally woke late in the morning to find myself alone. It was already hot and when I staggered into the sunlit kitchen, it reeked of heroin. Eli sat in a wooden chair with one arm folded back hard against her chest. She wore just jeans and a white singlet. Her neck was sweaty, her eyes post-coital and her belt was looped on the table; she'd obviously just had a hit.

‘Hi there,' she said.

A cat purred and squirmed around my legs. I eyed the spoon on the table. ‘Morning.'

‘I saved you a taste,' she said in a thick voice and nodded towards the crooked spoon. It wasn't a gift, not exactly, because junkies never gave gifts – especially not of drugs – but rather a sort of conclusion of events. ‘Thanks for last night,' she said. ‘It was fun.'

I was surprised, but knew right then and there that I would remember all this, the night and its subsequent morning, the girl in the kitchen like some creature raked from the sea; that it would be a memory to sing across the years to myself among so many unremembered nights and days. And so, I guess, it has been.