The Shallow End
ASHLEY SIEVWRIGHT
Clouds of Magellan
––––—
Melbourne
© Ashley Sievwright 2008
Clouds of Magellan Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9802983-4-5
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Sievwright, Ashley, 1970-
The shallow end / Ashley Sievwright.
ISBN: 9780980298345 (pbk.)
823.4
Cover image: Donna Tomlin - www.memoriesinprints.com
Cover design: Gordon Thompson
Printed by: Trojan Press - www.trojanpressbp.com.au
Digital distribution by
Ebook Alchemy
ISBN: 9781742980737 (Epub)
Conversion by Winking Billy
With thanks to Gordon, Nora and Luke.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
1
I was at the Prahran pool. I’d been going there almost every day since I got back from Spain. In Barcelona it was cold and women were wearing fur-collared coats on the beach, but back in Melbourne a hot dry summer was hitting its late December stride. It was perfect weather for hanging out at the pool; lucky really given that swimming laps, working on my tan and being depressed was pretty much all I wanted to do that summer.
I was lying on my stomach with my head turned, absently watching the other people at the pool. This stooge over the other side of the pool was getting changed out of his boardshorts under his towel—you know, like you see surfers do in car parks down at the beach. You don’t see it as often at the pool, where there are perfectly good changerooms just metres away. The stooge was, of course, well built in that hulky, too-big kind of way, so this possibly explains his choice of location.
And I swear, he made a three-act friggin play out of changing out of his boardshorts. His struggles with his slipping towel were masterful, teasing his audience with a glimpse of the top of his lily-white ass, but tantalisingly never dropping the towel completely until he finally tossed it aside (ta da!) to reveal he was wearing a pair of shorts not unlike the boardshorts. It was a modern male version of a fan-dance. When he was finished, some wag in the stands applauded. His mate joined in as did a few others who had been watching. One called, ‘Brava’.
Before I knew it my black dog had been thrown a bone and I actually laughed. Well, it was only a sharp exhalation through the nose, but it was the closest thing to a laugh I’d managed for a good three weeks and it felt incredible. Sure, I still felt like shit, as if I could cry at the drop of a hat, or more specifically at some soppy ad on tele for health insurance, showing a fetching newborn baby and its mother weeping with joy. Yes, this happened to me—I wept for a whole afternoon after watching this ad. But I was also aware that there was, in fact, another angle on the story. I wasn’t OK, but knew I would be again one of these days, and probably soon. With the flick of a switch my old friend perspective, which had deserted me for a while there, was suddenly back at the door looking sheepish for having stayed out on a three day bender. As a result everything seemed so glistening and new, like that slippy newborn baby in the ad.
In that moment of fresh perspective anything seems possible. Of course you realise quickly that ‘anything’ has never really been possible, and is becoming decreasingly possible as you move through your mid-30s, and of course your life is especially shit at the moment, but for those few moments it feels like being 17 and horny again.
—
I didn’t find out until a day or two later, but the same day I had a little trickle of perspective and cracked a smile, at approximately 3.22 pm some guy disappeared from the Prahran pool.
The headline in the newspaper was simply, MISSING SWIMMER. A lap-swimmer had gone missing, had vanished, disappeared. His name was Matt Gray. With a name like that he was asking to disappear really, wasn’t he?
Apparently, according to the paper, this guy got to the pool with his mates in the early arvo, lay in the sun for a bit then went off to do some laps. And that was it. He never came back. All his stuff—his backpack and his towel and his wallet and phone and keys—was left with his friends. He walked away from them to do his laps, wearing only his togs and holding his goggles, and he never came back.
I did have a question. Well, apart from the obvious one like, What the hell happened to him? And would everyone be really embarrassed when he walked in and said, Sorry I was just at the market buying some bagels? No the really big question to my mind was, How the hell could they say that he disappeared at ‘approximately 3.22’? There is nothing remotely approximate about ‘3.22’. And somehow that made it so much more pointed and creepy. None of this, Oh, I don’t know, he wandered off and we didn’t see him around for a while and then, well, there you go, it appears he’s missing. No, none of that. It’s like at 3.22 precisely he simply went up in a puff of smoke.
I hoped it was just some kind of weird muck-up and that he would turn up all innocent and apologetic and wondering what the fuss was all about.
I also wondered what I was doing at 3.22 pm that day. Whether I was swimming laps, or busy watching that guy do his little fan-dance with his towel.
I came to the conclusion that I was probably just lying there in the sun, feeling the sweat tickle down my ribs, with my eyes closed and my mind satisfyingly blank. Chances are.
—
I love the Prahran pool. It’s a beautiful relic. It’s one of those sixties public swimming pools that are dotted throughout Melbourne’s suburbs and are, somehow, as intrinsic a part of their suburbs as the postcode.
The Prahran pool has retained much of its original feel in part due to being adequately maintained enough not to need anything but the most basic repairs over the years. Little injections of botox rather than the full series of disastrous facelifts. It hasn’t become one of those big, anonymous, enclosed ‘aquatic centres’ like a lot of others which all seem very impersonal. No, this one seems like just what it is, a modest little suburban pool in near original condition. In the foyer you can see photos taken on the day the pool opened in the early sixties and there is very little difference to what exists today, except the plants are smaller.
The pool deck is made out of big, square, pebble-mix tiles. The edges of the pool walls are tiled with light blue, ridged tiles, chunky and chipped here and there (chips repaired, I note, with black electrical tape). The pool floor and walls are painted the traditional light blue, but here and there it’s either slightly darker or slightly lighter, where slipshod repairs have been undertaken. The men’s changerooms are largely made out of chunky moulded concrete, smoothed by 40 years of feet and slippery when wet. The windows of the changerooms are that frosted glass with chicken-wire in them.
The pool is book-ended at the north and south by hi-rise council flats. Built around the same time as the pool these towers are monuments to outmoded ideas of public housing and minimalist building methods. Not only in Prahran, these council flats hover, brown and grim, over some of the most popular and expensive streets in inner-suburban Melbourne.