The Shallow End. Ashley Sievwright

something like, ‘Boring I know.’ And maybe, ‘Aren’t we funny?’

      I nodded and smiled at him, then went in search of Vernon and Melanie. I didn’t, I don’t think anyway, see Matt again that night at Vernon’s. It was a sprawling party and I had arrived late.

      How much of my memory of that small interaction with Matt back then is real and how much of it isn’t? How much do we touch-up our memories? Give them a careful brush with turps to bring up the colour a bit clearer, or airbrush them, tuck in the edges? Especially when we remember, or tell ourselves we remember, something that happened on the hop, in the peripheral, without at the time having taken a moment to stop and stand still and make a concerted effort to commit it to memory.

      And now of course, writing this, I’m trying to remember what it actually was that I first remembered months ago. So my memory is two or three times removed from that moment at Vernon’s place and only getting further removed each time I think about it. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it’s like I’m reciting my 7x table or something and the distance between the moment I spoke to the missing swimmer and a reliable memory of that moment multiplies.

      3

      Now, I like a nice golden glow as much as the next man, but I didn’t want to end up as brown as Bastey Boy. He was at the pool almost every day that summer, and every day he lay in the exact same position on the grass in the pansy patch, oiled himself up and cooked himself in the sun. He was the most disturbing colour, I think because it was literally brown. Not the nice light golden colour that I think of as like the little peaks of a shepherds pie when it comes out of the oven, but literally brown. Can I say it again, Brown? It’s not a really nice colour for your skin. Seventies furniture yes, skin no. He was a hard one to name actually. There were a few possibilities. He walked kind of like a ballet dancer (feet pointing out) looked a little bit like he was maybe in a Duran Duran cover band (white blond fluffy hair), so it was either gunna be Rudolph or Duran but Bastey Boy stuck so Bastey it is.

      So the point is, yeah, I decided to have a day out of the sun and had re-settled myself in the shade this day when Red Trunks showed up and saw me. I mean, let’s be honest, I knew, you knew, we all knew this was going to happen the moment I saw him at the sauna, right? I just looked up from Bastey and there was Red Trunks, standing near the exit of the changerooms looking straight at me.

      I did that chin-raising backwards-nod hello thing that you do when you kind of don’t really know someone to talk to but want to acknowledge them.

      He stumped directly up the steps towards me, not particularly graciously or anything. His face was stern with a kind of studied disinterest.

      ‘You’re in the shade today,’ he said. I’d never heard his voice before and it was deep, serious and slightly off somehow. Maybe his ‘r’s had a little bit of ‘w’ in them or something like that? Whatever it was, and it was only subtle, it was hot. I’m a bit of a kink about speech impediments.