Shrink In Cold Water...

Hours after exercising for the first time in awhile, before the damage is felt and you spend the next few days unable even to scratch your nose without wincing, you feel just great. You bounce down the high street lighter than air, strutting confidently through the crowds with saucy smiles at the pretty ladies, feeling fit and healthy and attractive. Then you catch sight of yourself in a shop window and you stop and stare in shock, oblivious to the businessman who clatters into you from behind with a loud tut. You have not, as you assumed, instantly transformed into a svelte buff Adonis with a flat stomach and chiselled jaw line. You look, in fact, much as you did that morning. Overweight, pudgy, blobby. Not obese, not by a long shot. But the bulges are there, the ones that never existed when you were twenty-four and drinking beer rather than whiskey every night, for Christ’s sake. How can this be? You’ve just been through Hell.

It’s my fourth week of swimming and before I head into the pool I study myself in the mirror. I think it may be having an effect but since Cheryl broke our bathroom scales (water, not weight) I cannot be sure. I only have to raise my hands to my forehead to look normal now, but when they are by my sides I still wobble and jostle. And so I walk into the pool with my towel apparently casually, but actually artfully, draped over my shoulders to hide some of the excess flesh. It is late morning on a weekday and most of the men here, presumable un- or casually employed, seem to spend their spare time working on pumping up their bodies. The women do not. There is nothing to look at here. Apparently only middle-aged fat women have the time to swim. They do so with excruciating slowness and presumably only so that they can ogle the men in their tight Speedos clinging to impressive packages that, judging from the shower room afterwards, don’t even shrink in cold water.

I go in the fast lane and we pound up and down the ropes. I keep up with them all, breathing every three strokes and tumble-turning, at least until I run out of breath and then I cling to the wall after every length, gasping for air. But this renews me and the boys in the fast lane swim so fast that we send the water into a churning, pulsating wave machine. Those in the adjacent lanes almost drown in our wake. We push until our muscles and lungs are ready to burst and our wrists almost snap when we crash into the walls. When we have finished the water level will have dropped by three feet.

My goggles, inevitably, mist up, and swimmers coming the other way loom into view like ships in thick fog. And, startlingly, one of them is wearing a pink bikini. At the end of the length I stop and rinse out my goggles. On the second pass she looks slim and pretty, even with a rubber hat. On the third length I am already catching her up and the fact that she is slow in the fast lane makes me annoyed with her as well as intrigued and excited, which is confusing. On the fourth I am behind her almost immediately and as people are coming in the other direction and I cannot overtake, I switch to breaststroke and stay just two feet behind her. I am staring right into her, at the thin band of material then runs over the most intimate parts of her, everything rounded and pivoting in front of me, and even though it is not of my planning, I feel shamed somehow. When she stops to let me pass I stop too to rinse my goggles, but regret it because she is looking at me accusatorily. To distract her I look down at her bikini top, and even though it has only dropped a little on one side, I nod at it and tell her that she has popped out.

She drops down under the water up to her neck, grabbing for her top. “God. How embarrassing,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

“It does to me.”

“Come on,” I say with what I imagine might be a knowing smile. “I think we both knew from the instant we first laid eyes on each other that I was going to see them sooner or later. Why wait?”

She rolls her eyes. “Jesus.” She lowers her goggles and pushes off, and I am stuck behind her again, keeping my eyes on the lines on the floor.

I climb out after a mile – a proper mile, not a swimmer’s – and I can barely walk straight. I cover myself with my towel and when my vision clears I look back at my lane and realise that the man I was so proud of keeping up with is in fact swimming with a float between his legs and those resistance paddles that threaten to slice your fingers off if you nick them on the way past.

I get home and read on the couch for awhile and then close my eyes and fall into the kind of nap that leaves you feeling half dead for twenty minutes and then so good that you reminisce about it for the rest of the day. Cheryl is back from work when I stumble into the bedroom.

“You’re always here,” I tell her. “How can I ever bring a woman back if you’re always here?”

“Go to hers,” she says without looking up from the computer. “And stay there ‘cos you’re not coming back here.”

“You’re so fucking square,” I say, sitting on the bed. She is looking up properties on the Isle of Wight. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’m just exploring our options for when we get rich.”

“Have you invested in some amazing stocks I’m unaware of?”

“When your book reaches its first million sales we’ll buy a house.”

I sigh. “It must be nice living in your little world. I must visit one day. Besides, I thought we said Cornwall.”

“I thought the Cornish hated outsiders because we’re taking their houses and pricing them out of their own county and that they think they’re their own country when in fact they should accept that they’re just a small part of England and they should just shut up and run the pasty shops.”

“Cheryl! Some of my best friends are Cornish. You shouldn’t talk that way.”

“You told me that. In fact, you shouted it to me in a pub in Cornwall just before closing time, jabbing your finger at the locals.”

“Oh. How did they react?”

“A couple of them told you to fuck off.”

“See? Proved my point.”

It is two months until my novel is published, and yet this is how I spend my days. Tomorrow I’m working until five am on Sky’s studio coverage of a West Coast basketball game that will probably go to Overtime. It is, in a word, very strange.