Page 50 - WTP Vol. V #5

Marjorie swims, her blue hat bobbing like a child’s ball. She repeats her stroke like a mechanical doll. Don is standing at the shallow end, rubbing his hands over his chest and shoul- ders to keep warm. Overhead, through the glass roof, he can see hail stones falling, like the reverse of a water-ball snow storm. They could be sitting in front of the fire at home with a hot drink and a sandwich, but Marjorie insisted on going to Tues- day swimming straight after her appointment.
The Perfect Diver
Marjorie tells him all the time that if he didn’t shilly-shally getting in he’d warm up sooner. Don is the only man at the pool. The place is swarm- ing with women, as if women are the only sex on the planet, and he is a freak of nature. He remem- bers vaguely that certain species of fish can turn from male to female as they mature. Or is it to do with temperature? Males need more warmth, but maybe that’s crocodiles....He imagines Marjorie pulling him into the chilly water.
after his health. She nags him about smoking. Ever since her operation she’s had them on low- fat this and low-salt that; all she eats is salad and raw vegetables. She is so thin that the flesh hangs from her bones. Once, her body had a sweet appley roundness that buoyed her in the water when she swam. Now, all that can be seen of her is her wrinkled blue hat crowning her pinched face, and the red outline of her mouth. She is a strange, rubbery fish.
At the far side of the pool, in a roped-off lane, two women practice relay exchanges. He admires the one standing in the deep end—sleek and mus- cular in her seal-dark costume, grey goggles hiding her eyes. Don fancies that she could
Don has always been thin; he reckons that he is naturally fit, despite his smoking habit. He is sure that he looks much younger than sixty-three. The high figure of his cholesterol reading does not make sense to him. The doctor said that it was not always related to weight or diet but to inher- ent predispositions. Sinister little faults waiting to tip a man out of his mortal coil and toss him into the grave. Don tries to dismiss the hidden factors, the numbers that don’t show on his face, and, unlike Marjorie who is lined and grey, he reckons he looks pretty much as he did fifteen or twenty years ago.
be watching him through the dark lenses. He stands taller, holding in his stomach. The wom- an dives elegantly over her partner, entering the water with barely a splash.
Don swims amongst the chattering women, their high voices echoing in the air around him. He slides beneath the water and hears their voices come to him as dolphin sounds, and imagines himself as the alpha male of the pod, and that all these females are his.
Marjorie is coming toward him, her blue hat a warning beacon. Her stroke reminds him of needlework—tuck and stitch, tuck and stitch. He slaps his thighs, as if to make some monumental leap into the water, but the pool is crowded. He slides quietly in amongst the shoals of women when there’s a space, and pushes off from the side, crossing with Marjorie as she completes yet another length. Her mouth still has a trace of lipstick, a thin line of red that stretches like an elastic band as she takes in air.
One of the women is clearly pregnant, her gravid body waggling awkwardly. He can see her belly- button sticking out through her costume. Her baby must be due soon. Perhaps it’ll be a Christ- mas baby. He’d like to reach out, touch her swol- len belly to feel what it is like, sense the baby swimming inside her, curling and kicking in the warm fluid. He read that the fluid is like warm sea water and the baby a perfect diver, breathing and feeding through its umbilical cord. He is sure he could have fathered a child, and although Marjo- rie never became pregnant, he wonders whether a baby did once start out in her womb, but for
Marjorie is always telling him that he must look 41
ElizaBEth stott