One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  (In case you’re worrying, Phrixus made it safely to Colchis, where he – a little ungratefully – sheared the flying ram and gave the golden fleece to the king as a gift. Later Jason and his Argonauts came rowing up the Hellespont on a quest to find it. History doesn’t record how old Jason was, but I’m guessing forty-two, going on forty-three.)

  The Dardanelles is the Black Sea’s outlet pipe, a deep, wide channel of ocean that’s called the Bosphorus until it flows down past Istanbul into the Sea of Marmara and then onward to Troy and the Gallipoli peninsula and the sea. It divides two continents: this bank is Europe, the other side is Asia, and in between is the sea running like a river, up to six kilometres wide, pouring billions of kilolitres of salt water from the shores of Russia, Georgia and the Crimea down an immense crack in the earth to the wind-tossed Aegean.

  The Hellespont was an ancient symbol of separation. To cross it with intent was to invade another hemisphere and violate the natural order and it was always punished by the gods. When Xerxes came marching westwards out of Persia to invade the Greeks in 480 BC – thus setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to Thermopylae and the movie 300 and ultimately Zack Snyder becoming the Batman v. Superman director – he crossed the Hellespont by creating a bridge of boats tied bow to stern. When a storm destroyed the bridge he had the water whipped 300 times and shackles thrown into the waves to enslave the strait. Thus chastened, the Dardanelles suffered him to build a second bridge and march across a million men, the greatest army ever seen.

  A hundred and fifty years later Alexander the Great marched the other way and did the same thing, only without the whipping and the shackles. Crossing the Hellespont was like crossing the Rubicon, only before the Rubicon was invented and fifteen times wider. Once you crossed it, alea jacta est: you couldn’t change your mind. Xerxes came back from Greece humbled with his army shattered and in revolt. Alexander never came back. He died in Asia without ever reaching the Hellespont again, and his empire fell apart before his body was properly cool.

  The east–west division is one the ancients took seriously. The Egyptians built their cities on one side of the Nile and their necropolises on the other. One side for the living, where the sun rises each morning like a baby; the other for the dead.

  Isn’t that what mid-life is? The crossing of something, some dark river, and once you’re there, you can’t come back? It’s a pretty good symbol. Someone looking for a quest for their midlife crisis should definitely do that one, but what does that have to do with me?

  And then I remembered how this stupid idea made it onto my list in the first place. It was Lord Byron.

  Byron was a shrimpy character who limped from a club foot and suffered all his life from fluctuating weight – as little as sixty kilograms, as much as eighty-nine. Despite his limp, or perhaps because of it, he liked a swim.

  He swam in the River Cam while still at university but that’s no big deal, lots of people do, especially in Fresher’s Week and often with their clothes on. He swam the Tagus in Lisbon and the Grand Canal in Venice and on 3 May 1810, before he’d written anything much, while on a kind of Napoleonic-era gap year around Europe and the Levant, he swam across the Hellespont.

  Actually he failed the first time and was fished out by a faithful servant in a rowboat, but he tried again and got it right on the second go. Afterwards he wrote home in a letter: “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”

  Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a twenty-two-year-old who hasn’t done anything yet. When we’re twenty-two, we’re so grateful to do anything, we always think it’s the best thing we could have done.

  Afterwards he went home and published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made him very famous, and married his half-sister, which made him very notorious, and eventually died fighting to liberate Greece from the Turks, aged thirty-six. He didn’t have a chance to have a midlife crisis, which may be just as well since it’s hard to see what more he could have done, but it’s also very sad because poets become most interesting when they’ve passed middle age.

  At any rate I must have read about Byron while I was a smug, un-ageing thirtysomething in the comfort of my own apartment, possibly with a drink within reach, because I immediately scribbled it down on my list of things to do, almost certainly thinking, “If a runty poet with weight issues and a gammy leg could do it, how hard can it be?”

  But now I’m forty, wiser and more wizened, and I know there’s not a chance I’m getting into deep water on the far side of the world.

  I took my partner for a walk that evening and told her about Byron and the Hellespont, and how he was the first recorded person to do it, and she wanted to know what gave him the idea, and I told her about Hero and Leander.

  We were walking on the Promenade beside the sea wall as I told her, and the sea was purpling in the dusk and the lights of the ships in the roadstead were coming on like the lamps of distant hilltowns. Walking with her before dinner is my favourite time of day, and it’s always better when I have a story to tell.

  I told her how Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite and sworn to purity, thus forbidden to the lovelorn Leander. She lived in a high stone tower in the town of Sestos, on the European side, and Leander lived in Abydos, across the strait in Asia.

  Each night Leander would slip from his home and into the wine-dark rushing sea and swim across, guided by a lantern that Hero hung from the top of the tower. It’s unclear from the story how he managed to get up to her – this isn’t Rapunzel, so perhaps there was just a door and stairs – but they would dally the night away and he’d slip back through the waves by dawn’s peachy light. You can tell Hero and Leander were younger than forty-three in this tale, because no one ever says anything about them taking a night off every now and then to get some sleep.

  One dark night a wind came up, and all unknown to Hero the lantern was blown out. Leander lost his way and drowned. Hero waited and waited but he didn’t come, and when she discovered the extinguished light and realised what had happened, she threw herself from the tower in sorrow and remorse.

  “Those Greeks, hey,” said my partner. “Even when the girl’s the Hero, she still has to wait for the man.”

  The sun had set now and the air was grainy as a Kentridge sketch. A yellow moon came up over the mountain.

  Those Greeks, I agreed.

  We walked a little way further.

  “You know,” she said, “if you were to swim across the Dardanelles, I’d wait for you on the other side.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yup. I’d be your Hero, baby.”

  And she smiled shyly, the way she does when she’s made a joke, and I thought about swimming a quest to impress her, and of her being on the other side, and just like that, with a sickly, heavy feeling in my stomach, I knew that’s what I had to do.

  6

  Waiting to Inhale

  Day 1

  There’s a man who sits naked on a plastic chair all day long in the steam room at my gym. Sometimes on his lap he drapes a white towel the size of a hand. It must be very absorbent. There’s a glass wall between the steam room and the changing area, so this man glistens a lot and rehydrates from a water bottle while he regally watches us coming and going and taking off our clothes. Some call this man creepy, but I prefer to believe he’s protecting us. He’s like an excited paramedic, ready to spring into action if someone slips on a bar of soap or chokes on a nutritional supplement. He’s the Lifeguard of the Locker Room, our guardian angel, with occasional erections.

  If you want to see creepy, look no further than that guy who dries his pubic hair with the hairdryer. This is the world we live in now.

  It’s my first day of training to swim the Dardanelles. I’ve decided to just jump in and see how far I can go. I’ve calculated that the best time to swim is 2.30 p.m., after the lunchtime rush, before the kids come after school. It’s discouraging to swi
m alongside those damn kids. Six, twelve, fifteen years old, all like porpoises with arms.

  I saunter out to the pool carrying a ratty old beach towel and wearing my pair of knee-length trunks. Why buy all the equipment if you’re not sure you’ll be able to do the exercise? I learnt that the hard way in hula-hoop season.

  I need the gym to be as empty as possible because it has one of those open-plan arrangements: the pool is overlooked by people working out on weight machines and exercise bikes. I don’t want people staring at me, and gym users are like sharks in the open sea: their attention is drawn to irregular movements and jerky motions.

  There’s a clear lane on the far side of the pool, away from the women on the leg-machines working their quadriflexors or spondiceptors. I should stretch before I swim. What sort of stretches do swimmers do? I try a knee bend and become stuck in the squatting section. I topple gracefully onto my side like a wheelbarrow blowing over in a strong wind. This is discouraging.

  I remember watching the Olympics and Chad le Clos doing a stretchy thing where he pulled his arm around in front of him and put his chin over his shoulder. I give it a try. From behind it must look like I’m trying to practise my kissing technique on myself.

  I nonchalantly dip my toe to test the temperature, like a teenager at a disco sidling past the dancefloor with his hands in his pockets. It’s harder than I remember to dip your toe in the water while staying balanced on your other leg. There’s a horrible moment of arm-wheeling and teeter-tottering. I look suspiciously at the closed-circuit cameras. Is someone taking footage of this? Will I appear on Facebook: “I Thought It Was Just a Regular Day at the Pool, But You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!”

  One of the women in red golf-shirts from the reception desk comes over with something to say.

  “You need to wear a cap,” she says.

  “Oh, I won’t be going fast enough to worry about drag,” I assure her modestly.

  She explains that her concern is not my hydrodynamic profile, but a question of hygiene. I look confused. Hairs, she says.

  Now, let me tell you, I’m no shedder. I quite often rub up against white woollen sweaters without anyone knowing I’ve ever been there, but I don’t want to explain this to a stranger while half-naked, so I wrap my towel round my shoulders like a shawl and pad through the weights section to the gym shop, trying to look slender and serene, like Gandhi.

  I buy a cap and, what the hell, a pair of goggles too. I can wear them on the way back to the pool to cut down on the chances of being recognised.

  (By the way, having now spent some considerable time in the Virgin Active pool with nothing better to look at than the water, I’d like to say that it’s a bit of a damn cheek for them to worry about my hair. There are some days when the clarity’s good and it’s like plunging beneath a polar ice-cap in the waters where the narwhal play, but other times it’s a primordial soup down there, a repulsive cloudy stew of amino acids and DNA, sloughed skin and body juices. I tend to blame the children but it’s probably all of us. We all leave bits of ourselves behind, as though the world is one big crime scene.)

  I dive in and swim as far as I can underwater, on the principle that the further you travel down there, the less you need to travel on top, and also so that if anyone looks up at that enormous splash they’ll see nothing but turbulent water and just a fugitive shadow passing beneath.

  I don’t know how fast I’m supposed to be swimming. I settle into a pace less fast than my fastest. Kicking is the propeller that drives my craft, so I give the water a good churn. Breathe on one side, take three strokes, breathe on the other. When I reach the far wall I turn like a tractor in a field. No tumble-turns for me. You can’t tumble-turn in the ocean, and you probably wouldn’t want to, unless you were planning to swim to Asia and then back again.

  I swim the second lap. As the oxygen is used up in my blood, doubts assail me. Do you stretch out your arm for more reach, or bend it slightly for speedier leverage? I should have watched more swimming on television. Ian Thorpe has massive feet. How can I make my feet bigger? I have flat feet – that’s an advantage, surely? My breath rasps like a body going through a woodchipper. My face is burning. How can anything burn underwater? Maybe it’s made of the same material as that flying fish’s cigarette. My trunks are dragging me under. They’re like a knee-length suit of armour. The oxygen deprivation is starting to tell: for a terrible moment I consider kicking them off and carrying on without them.

  By the end of the third lap I’m effectively swimming underwater. Only my hands and the soles of my feet occasionally break the surface, like some kind of reverse duck. I cling to the side like someone who has fallen from his balcony and managed to snag the next one down. I hold on for dear life until I remember the pool’s only a metre deep here. Then I stand but I still keep one hand on the side in case it floats away. I wheeze and cough and then I manage another three laps – two, then another long rest, then a last, limping, pitiful length, like one of those chaps at the end of the Comrades who come crawling to the finish line, and you smile while you clap but in your dark heart you can’t be sure whether you’re moved by their grit or whether you’re actually just laughing at them.

  Six laps.

  That’s what I manage: six laps, with two breaks in between.

  I feel peculiar afterwards, simultaneously flat-footed and floaty but not floaty in the good way. I’m not made for this medium. I’m a land creature. My lungs have evolved to breathe unwatered air. I watch other swimmers tilling their lanes. They aren’t all seals and otters, some are walruses and dugongs, but they’re all creatures of the water. I’m as land-based as a baobab tree. I’ll have to find something else. I can’t do it.

  7

  Lucky Gym

  My partner is adept at a martial art called conversational judo, where you allow your opponent to rush and bluster and then stumble and fall of his own weight and pin himself all by himself.

  I went home and told her that I’m not cut out for swimming, and she nodded and said that’s certainly possible, swimming’s not for everyone, it’s not for her either, and if I don’t think I can do it, I definitely shouldn’t.

  So I came back and watched other people doing it. I’m not saying my gym is awash with expert swimmers; it wasn’t experts I was looking for. When you’re learning to paint, watching Picasso will do you more harm than good.

  I once sat at the Sea Point pool like a star-struck boy at a stage door and watched Otto Thaning swim lengths. Otto Thaning is one of those fools who swims from shore to Robben Island and back to shore again and in September 2014, aged seventy-three, he became the oldest man to swim the English Channel. His swimming style is all ease and politeness, as though he was made on a planet with different properties to this one. Each individual movement is so slow but has an overall effect of such speed you think it must be some subtle illusion using mirrors. He doesn’t make ripples but a low glassy bow-wave, and behind him the water seems calmer for his passing. You can’t start swimming by watching that, any more than you can start playing cello by watching Pablo Casals. From the truly great you can learn how to love a thing, not how to do it.

  Instead I watched the others – the middle-aged shleppers like me. You can’t take your style from one random stranger in a pool, but taken as an average you can extrapolate certain guidelines. The arm should be bent when it leaves the water. The wrist should be cocked when it enters. Look at the kicking – the ones who swim further tend to kick less.

  I also spent some time watching the kids’ after-school swimming lessons. That was quite a cheerful experience, actually, especially the very young kids. They did all sorts of strange exercises that made no sense – dawdling along with kick-boards under their heads and doing odd drills where they paused their arm in mid-stroke over their heads like a swan or a snorkel – but it’s encouraging to watch people swimming who are worse at it than you. Look at that one, I thought. I could beat that one.

  I smiled upon each five
-year-old flounderer with the generosity of one who knows he should get in his generosity while he can because by next month the object of his charity will be better than he is. Ah, but there’s always another beginners’ class. Thank heavens for little boys and girls.

  But there’s a danger in spending too much time smiling at small children in Speedos, like some chlorinated Maurice Chevalier. For a time I’d been receiving searching looks from the moms and dads. Finally one of them sidled closer with a flinty smile.

  “So, is your child here?” she said.

  “Um,” I said.

  I realised the delicacy of my position. Sure, I could explain that I was just there to pick up tips, but there’s a certain lack of plausibility to that explanation, and once you have been reported to management for eyeing out small children, it’s hard to erase the stain on your record. Who knows what innocent mishaps might be misconstrued in future? Would it be entered on my record? Every time I swiped my entry card would the people in red golf-shirts nudge each other and follow me around the club for the rest of the session? It’s no good. I still have to share a pool with these people.

  “Um,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Oh! Which one?”

  I waggled my hand vaguely at the pool.

  “Justin?” she said.

  Oh god.

  “No,” I said, “not Justin.”

  “Keegan? Siya?”

  Does she know all of them? Don’t these people have lives?

  In my head, I was reading the first paragraph in the newspaper. “Early forties … unmarried, childless … misrepresented himself as a parent …” I pictured married friends looking up from their Sunday papers, saying slightly too casually: “When he came over that time, did he take an interest in the kids? Do you think?”