In the seven years I have rarely had to dive in. It is a quiet, slow swimming pool, certainly nothing like the local pool I bring my boys to on a Saturday where you’d leave with a headache from the shouts that echo from the filled-to-the-brim group classes.
I stifle a yawn as I watch the first swimmer in the early morning. Mary Kelly, the dredger, is doing her favourite move: the breaststroke. Slow and noisy, at five feet tall and weighing three hundred pounds she pushes out water as if she’s trying to empty the pool, and then attempts to glide. She manages this manoeuvre without once putting her face below the water and blowing out constantly as though she’s in below-zero conditions. It is always the same people at the same times. I know that Mr Daly will soon arrive, followed by Mr Kennedy aka the Butterfly King who fancies himself as a bit of an expert, then sisters Eliza and Audrey Jones who jog widths of the shallow end for twenty minutes. Non-swimmer Tony Dornan will cling to a float for dear life like he’s on the last life raft, and hover in the shallow end, near to the steps, near to the wall. I fiddle with a pair of goggles, unknotting the strap, reminding myself to breathe, pushing away the hard tight feeling in my chest that only goes away when I remember to exhale.
Mr Daly steps out of the changing room and on to the tiles, 9.15 a.m. on the dot. He wears his budgie smugglers, an unforgiving light blue that reveal the minutiae when wet. His skin hangs loosely around his eyes, cheeks and jowls. His skin is so transparent I see almost every vein in his body and he’s covered in bruises from even the slightest bump, I’m sure. His yellow toenails curl painfully into his skin. He gives me a miserable look and adjusts his goggles over his eyes. He shuffles by me without a good morning greeting, ignoring me as he does every day, holding on to the metal railing as if at any moment he’ll go sliding on the slippery tiles that Mary Kelly is saturating with each stroke. I imagine him on the tiles, his bones snapping up through his tracing-paper-like skin, skin crackly like a roasted chicken.
I keep one eye on him and the other on Mary, who is letting out a loud grunting sound with each stroke like she is Maria Sharapova. Mr Daly reaches the steps, takes hold of the rail and lowers himself slowly into the water. His nostrils flare as the cold hits him. Once in the water he checks to see if I’m watching. On the days that I am, he floats on his back for long periods of time like he’s a dead goldfish. On days like today, when I’m not looking, he lowers his body and head under the water, hands gripping the top of the wall to hold himself down and stays there. I see him, clear as day, practically on his knees in the shallow end, trying to drown himself. This is a daily occurrence.
‘Sabrina,’ my supervisor Eric warns from the office behind me.
‘I see him.’
I make my way to Mr Daly at the steps. I reach into the water and grab him under his arms and pull him up. He is so light he comes up easily, gasping for air, eyes wild behind his goggles, a big green snot bubble in his right nostril. He lifts his goggles off his head and empties them of water, grunting, grumbling, his body shaking with rage that I have once again foiled his dastardly plan. His face is purple and his chest heaves up and down as he tries to catch his breath. He reminds me of my three-year-old who always hides in the same place and then gets annoyed when I find him. I don’t say anything, just make my way back to the stool, my flip-flops splashing my calves with cold water. This happens every day. This is all that happens.
‘You took your time there,’ Eric says.
Did I? Maybe a second longer than usual. ‘Didn’t want to spoil his fun.’
Eric smiles against his better judgement and shakes his head to show he disapproves. Before working here with me since the nursing home’s birth, Eric had a previous Mitch Buchannon lifeguard experience in Miami. His mother on her deathbed brought him back home to Ireland and then his mother surviving has made him stay. He jokes that she will outlive him, though I can sense a nervousness on his part that this will indeed be the case. I think he’s waiting for her to die so that he can begin living, and the fear as he nears fifty is that that will never happen. To cope with his self-imposed pause on his life, I think he pretends he’s still in Miami; though he’s delusional, I sometimes envy his ability to pretend he is in a place far more exotic than this. I think he walks to the sound of maracas in his head. He is one of the happiest people I know because of it. His hair is Sun-In orange, and his skin is a similar colour. He doesn’t go on any traditional ‘dates’ from one end of the year to the other, saving himself up for the month in January when he disappears to Thailand. He returns whistling, with the greatest smile on his face. I don’t want to know what he does there but I know that his hopes are that when his mother dies, every day will be like Thailand. I like him and I consider him my friend. Five days a week in this place has meant I’ve told him more than I’ve even told myself.
‘Doesn’t it strike you that the one person I save every day is a person who doesn’t even want to live? Doesn’t it make you feel completely redundant?’
‘There are plenty of things that do, but not that.’ He bends over to pick up a bunch of wet grey hair clogging the drains, which looks like a drowned rat, and he holds on to it, shaking the water out of it, not appearing to feel the repulsion that I do. ‘Is that how you’re feeling?’
Yes. Though it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t matter if the man I’m saving doesn’t want his life to be saved, shouldn’t the point be that I’m saving him? But I don’t reply. He’s my supervisor, not my therapist, I shouldn’t question saving people while on duty as a lifeguard. He may live in an alternative world in his head but he’s not stupid.
‘Why don’t you take a coffee break?’ he offers, and hands me my coffee mug, the other hand still holding the drowned rat ball of pubic hair.
I like my job very much but lately I’ve been antsy. I don’t know why and I don’t know what exactly I’m expecting to happen in my life, or what I’m hoping will happen. I have no particular dreams or goals. I wanted to get married and I did. I wanted to have children and I do. I want to be a lifeguard and I am. Though isn’t that the meaning of antsy? Thinking there are ants on you when there aren’t.
‘Eric, what does antsy mean?’
‘Um. Restless, I think, uneasy.’
‘Has it anything to do with ants?’
He frowns.
‘I thought it was when you think there are ants crawling all over you, so you start to feel like this,’ I shudder a bit. ‘But there aren’t any ants on you at all.’
He taps his lip. ‘You know what, I don’t know. Is it important?’
I think about it. It would mean that I think there is something wrong with my life because there actually is something wrong with my life or that there is something wrong with me. But it’s just a feeling, and there actually isn’t. There not being something wrong would be the preferred solution.
What’s wrong, Sabrina? Aidan’s been asking a lot lately. In the same way that constantly asking someone if they’re angry will eventually make them angry.
Nothing’s wrong. But is it nothing, or is it something? Or is it really that it is nothing, everything is just nothing? Is that the problem? Everything is nothing? I avoid Eric’s gaze and concentrate instead on the pool rules, which irritate me so I look away. You see, there it is, that antsy thing.