One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  Oh my god, I did take an interest in their kids! Not a real interest – I was just being polite! No good deed goes unpunished!

  “Who then?” she said.

  Who was this woman? Where do you get the nerve to go up to strangers and interrogate them about their families?

  “Marcia,” I said. I told you before I’m not good with names. I don’t know where the name Marcia came from. I suspect The Brady Bunch.

  Oh god, why am I free-associating old TV shows with lots of stepchildren?

  “Marcia?” she said. “I don’t know Marcia.”

  The next question she’s going to ask is, “Which one’s Marcia?”

  “Will you excuse me?” I said, “I just have to go and …”

  Behind me as I fled I could hear her saying, “Which one’s Marcia …?”

  So for a while I only went back on weekends, when the kids didn’t have swimming lessons. I spent so long watching men swim that the Lifeguard of the Locker Room started nodding to me in fraternal acknowledgement.

  It would be reasonable to ask why I didn’t just get a swimming coach. That’s a question my partner asked.

  “I don’t want a swimming coach,” I said. “They cost money.”

  She nodded.

  “Plus I’d have to go every day.”

  “Shouldn’t you go every day?”

  “I can’t go every day. I’m not a fanatic. I can’t even bath every day.”

  “I’m sure you can get a swimming coach who won’t make it a condition of training you that you have to go every day.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  I looked at the TV. Sometimes if I look at the TV long enough, I won’t have to talk about the thing I don’t feel like talking about. She looked at me while I looked at the TV.

  “If I get a coach,” I said at last, “he’ll tell me what to do. I know myself. I’m forty years old. I can’t have some guy telling me what to do. I’ll just become resentful. I’ll never keep going.”

  “Now,” she said, “I think you’re telling the truth.”

  8

  Fall and Rise

  If you go slowly, you can go further. I don’t mean a little bit slowly, where you hang back a little off your pace so you can surprise the front-runners and pip them at the post like Sea Biscuit. I mean going as slow as it is possible to move without someone diving in to rescue you.

  I don’t care about style. I don’t care that the kids’ swimming coach made them watch me to see what not to do. I’m a grownup, damn it, I can do what I want. And I don’t care how long it takes me. I swim so slowly I never get out of breath. I kick slowly and sparingly. The first time out I was scissoring like Jodie Foster to get me some manly forward power but now I didn’t care. Manly forward power doesn’t keep you coming back for more. I kick without manly forward power. My legs open and close as leisurely as the post office.

  Eventually, after a month, I swim twenty lengths.

  Twenty lengths is pretty good. Say, how long is twenty lengths anyway? I sit afterwards in a slight glazed daze, drying myself and staring at the water. That’s a long pool. That must be – what? It can’t be fifty metres, can it? Let’s be conservative. Let’s say it’s thirty-five metres. This means I swam, in total, without too much of a rest in the middle … oooh … 35 × 20 … 700 metres! Look, it’s not far, if you measure according to normal standards of length. It won’t get me much off the side of the Dardanelles. But 700 metres is not nothing.

  On my way out, whistling jauntily, I think to ask one of the red-shirts behind reception: “How long is the pool, by the way?”

  I’m expecting her to say “Thirty-five metres”, at which point I’ll pretend I’m instantly doing the calculation in my head, and say, “700 metres, ay? Well, well, so I just swam 700 metres? Now fancy that!”

  That man, she’ll think, is not a child-molester. He is a serious swimmer.

  “Twenty-five metres, sir,” she says without looking up.

  What? There must be some mistake. I stalk back to the pool and try to pace out the length. First I walk foot-on-foot, toe against heel, but that doesn’t help because I don’t know how long my feet are. “Less than Thorpe-sized” is not a recognised measurement. So I pace it out in what I think might be metre-long paces. No matter how short I make them, I can’t squeeze in thirty-five.

  “Measuring the pool?” asks the kids’ swimming instructor.

  “Mm,” I reply.

  “It’s not twenty-five metres,” he said.

  “It isn’t, right?” I say, delighted.

  “No way. It’s about twenty-three, I reckon, but they won’t admit it.”

  This is a setback.

  Five hundred metres at best. A mile is 1 650 metres. That’s sixty-six lengths of a twenty-five-metre pool. The distance across the Dardanelles is 4.5 kilometres. That’s 180 lengths. Throw in a few more laps to make up for the resting time as you turn, and also the effect of the waves and current and the open water …

  The swim across the Dardanelles happens on 31 August each year. I have five months to improve my swimming distance more than 900 per cent.

  When athletes and winners encounter a psychological setback, they don’t mope or lose heart; they come back the next day, more determined than ever. I read Lewis Pugh’s book about being a long-distance swimmer and swimming in Antarctica and similar stupidities. It’s called 21 Yaks and a Speedo. What a dumb name. Who’d buy a book with the word “Speedo” in the title?

  “There’s nothing more powerful than the made-up mind,” says Lewis Pugh. “When you believe in yourself, you can achieve the impossible. One stroke at a time will get you across the channel.”

  This is how winners respond to setbacks: you take your made-up mind back to the pool and do one stroke at a time, one lap at a time, until you get there.

  This is not how I respond to my setback.

  I respond by lying on the sofa in a darkened room and eating ice cream while watching the first four seasons of Game of Thrones.

  *

  Something I didn’t mention: while I was at the doctor, he looked at something on my face.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  It was a kind of fleck, a blemish I’d had for a while.

  “I’d have that seen to,” he said.

  This is the other problem with doctors. Ninety-nine per cent of all problems with my car happen immediately after a service. You go in for that slight knocking under the hood and you come out in the market for a skateboard.

  I went to a dermatologist. No more crusty white guys with ferrous ponytails; I booked with the young Indian woman who looks a bit like Mindy Kaling.

  She looked at the blemish. “That’s nothing,” she said.

  “Great,” I said.

  “But I don’t like those things.”

  “What things?”

  I thought for a moment she meant my ears – I don’t like them either – but she pointed to a couple of small specks on the side of my nose, so small I’d never noticed them. They were on the right side, the driving side, the sunny side of the face.

  “Let’s take those out and look at them,” she said.

  “Can’t you just look at them where they are?”

  “And that too.” She pointed to a speck that I’ve always imagined lent a certain rakish accent to my cheekbone. “Right now.”

  “Right now?”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “Will it, uh, I mean, will it leave a scar, or …?”

  “Girls like a scar,” she said as she dug into me with something you’d use to take core-samples from a meteorite. She came away with a good portion of my face.

  “Jesus,” I said weakly, looking at a long thin piece of myself on the end of a metal instrument.

  “I’ll let you know what the biopsy says,” she told me cheerfully.

  Oh excellent. I’ll add that to the list of words I’ve never had to use before. Cholesterol. Epididymic. Biopsy. Maybe middle age is reall
y nothing more than expanding your vocabulary. No longer do I need to lie awake at four in the morning, worrying about things that have no names. Now I know what they’re called.

  I went to tea with my mother and she noticed the bandage on my face, because mothers notice these things. I told her about my visit.

  “Oh yes,” she said vaguely. “Your father had skin cancer too.” There was a protracted silence after this.

  “Did he?” I said, in a tone of voice that I hope conveyed just the right balance of surprise, sympathy and why-the-hell-haven’t-I-heard-this-before?

  “Oh yes. He was given six months to live.”

  “WHEN?”

  I very much hoped the answer wouldn’t be a month before he died.

  “When I was three months’ pregnant with you,” she said.

  These are the kinds of conversations that make me avoid conversations. One minute you are who you were and life is as it was, and then all suddenly and casually while your mom eats a Pyott’s Romany Cream, everything becomes screwy.

  “But …” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “he just ignored it and it went away. He eventually died of something else altogether.”

  Two things occurred to me. Firstly, I now understand whence comes my personal philosophy of ignoring problems until they go away. This is a policy that sometimes works well (parking tickets, mysterious testicular discomfort), and other times less well (income tax).

  Secondly, I remembered my childhood. Not in a sad way: I wasn’t remembering being lonely or missing my dad, although I was and I did and indeed I still do. No, I was remembering all those splendid sunny days when my mother sent me to play outside in Durban’s solar bombardment with no more ultraviolet protection than a pair of eyebrows and some lashes. I’m not sure that I knew before I was an adult that some lotions are for preventing suntanning. I’m surprised I don’t look more like W.H. Auden or a roast boar from an Asterix comic.

  It must have been terrific being an adult in the 1970s and 1980s – other than atomic bombs, terrorists and hitchhikers, they weren’t afraid of anything. Unless some particular peril came with a health warning on the side – and back then nothing came with a health warning on the side – our parents seemed incapable of imagining it might not be good for us. Cigarettes? Their idea of considerate smoking was cracking one of the windows at the drive-in. They thought coughing was the universal sign everyone was having a good time. Running with scissors? We ran with scissors all the time. We treated scissors as though they were relay batons. I’m sure I even remember my mom saying, “Quick, Darrel, fetch me my scissors. Hurry back!”

  Unless the sun actually acquired a sunspot in the shape of a billboard with a surgeon-general’s warning, how could they be expected to discourage their heirs and offspring from burning, blistering and broiling themselves day after day? Perhaps the clue was in the wording: burn, burning. Being burnt isn’t a desirable condition for a human being.

  “Tch, you’ve gotten sunburnt again,” they’d say, but in a very different tone of voice to, say, “You’ve burnt yourself in the fire again.”

  There wasn’t a peril our parents didn’t proudly send us to face. Seatbelts? Bicycle helmets? Supervised use of fireworks? Those were things that Scandinavians did. My parents sought out danger. They encouraged me to join the Scouts, which is a little like dropping a small boy at a street corner with a sign around his neck saying, “Attention, strangers! This child likes sweeties and will be happy to take them from you!”

  Once when I was six we stopped to watch some guys hang-gliding off the edge of the Bluff. One of them, some spotty detrimental my dad had never seen before, asked if I wanted to hang-glide with him. I’d need to hold on tight. “Do it!” my dad beamed. “It’ll be fun.” (Actually, it was fun.)

  There were only three suburban dangers my mom acknowledged:

  Empty fridges. I don’t know why they loomed so large in her imagination, but she was always worrying we’d fall foul of one. They haunted her. She would have found Jaws far more frightening had it involved the inhabitants of a small seaside town being terrorised by an empty fridge. It’s not as though there was an abundance of empty fridges littering our neighbourhood. I spent many long afternoons searching with the Renyard twins. When we did finally find one we locked Dudley Renyard inside to see what would happen. Answer: it made him smell of plastic and old milk.

  Swimming within an hour of having eaten. I confess I don’t actually know what would happen, because her warnings were so dire I’ve always been too afraid to try it out. Probably an empty fridge would close around my ankle like a giant clam and hold me underwater until I drown.

  Microwaves. The worst peril of all. My mom would never buy a microwave, even after they became affordable. Didn’t trust ’em. All that radiation. If you wanted to heat up leftovers in my house, you had to do it the old-fashioned way: by sitting on them. If you wanted radiation you had to do it the healthy way: by going outside and exposing yourself to the fallout from a series of thermonuclear reactions on a nearby star.

  It’s a singular feeling, living with the possibility that cancer is growing in you. One shouldn’t be too metaphorical with cancer. The Greeks thought of it as a crab inside our body. I don’t know what those Greeks were on about. A crab is a revolting thought but also a comforting one, because a crab isn’t you, it’s something else, and if you can get your hands on it you can kill it and possibly eat it with some chopped parsley and a good-quality mayonnaise. Cancer isn’t really something you can kill – it’s you. It’s your own cells turning on you, the tinny ringing of some invisible alarm clock you didn’t even know had been set.

  If there’s a metaphor for cancer, it’s probably age itself. You’re not growing up any more; you’re not growing at all. The processes that brought you here have taken a dark turn. Your body can no longer be relied on to work in your best interest: now it has its own agenda that doesn’t necessarily chime with yours. Even if it doesn’t do the job right now, a rubber band has been wound up, and you’ll get yours soon enough, kid.

  I went back to the dermatologist, and I was nervous so I asked her whether she was from Durban, and she said, “Just because I’m Indian, doesn’t mean I’m from Durban”, so I stammered, but it turned out she actually was from Durban, it was just her little joke, and we laughed and I told her about how I used to go to Kingsmead for the cricket and sit in the sun all day without sunblock, and she stopped smiling and said, “Just because I’m Indian, doesn’t mean I like cricket.” By that time I wasn’t in the mood for joking any more.

  The diagnosis was all right. She explained that I have some sort of squamous-cell complication that is cancerish but not quite cancer.

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “No cancer for me.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “One day, who knows?”

  “It might become cancer?”

  “It might not.”

  Squamous and cancer: two more words to add to the list of distasteful words I’m too squeamish to say aloud, along with panties, pimples and sausage.

  I asked my mom what my dad did when he received his diagnosis. What do you mean, he ignored it? And she said that when he was told he had six months to live, and he counted forward and realised that I would only be born in six months’ time, he didn’t sit and mope and lie awake at night like some university-educated moonchild. Instead he borrowed a friend’s kit and taught himself to weld. In the evenings after his day-job as a travelling salesman for a motor-oil company he went around the neighbourhood offering to do odd-jobs and taking orders for hand-welded burglar bars to make extra money so that he could leave her something with which to raise me.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “What did I do?” she said. “What could I do? I carried you. I carried on.”

  When she told me that, I felt embarrassed about complaining about my parents. I felt embarrassed a
bout the nights I lay awake and my whining tone of voice.

  And then I thought – and this was a good thought to have – I need to be more like my mother and father.

  *

  I go back to the pool, of course. You have to go back. It’s like writing: fear drives you from it and then fear brings you back.

  But my confidence is down. It’s a hot, bright Thursday outside and the muscle floor is filled with people who look like they have bodies for a living and even as I come plodding in I have that familiar teenaged feeling that wherever it is I belong, it’s not here.

  But I’ve been reading my Lewis Pugh. Lewis Pugh says you need to plan to succeed. My plan today is to try swim thirty laps, and only take one break along the way. The water looks good today: it moves gently like warm plastic and the light doesn’t bounce off it, it seems to bob on top.

  I dive in and the visibility’s good. I can see the texture of the grouting on the bottom, and places where tiles are missing, and someone’s hair-elastic.

  For the first seven or eight laps I feel okay. I’m as slow as an island but I’m breathing fine. I’m like one of those people in Game of Thrones who walk all that way through the snow: I just need to keep trudging and I’ll get there, and maybe someone in the background will have their top off for no good reason, which will be nice, so long as they don’t also have their head chopped off.

  Then I get tired. It’s all the ice cream. My body feels heavy and I droop in the water. I’ve bought a Speedo by now so it’s not the trunks, it’s me: my muscles have turned to pancake batter. My flesh is made of old spark plugs.

  I bargain with myself: just ten laps, then you can stop. There’ll still be twenty to go, but you can worry about that later. I get to ten and I’m about to stop, but I think of those twenty still to do and I think: just do one more now. One more you do now is one you won’t have to do then. Think how much you’ll enjoy that break.

  We all need to find what drives us and by now I’m old enough to know that I’m not driven by the restless hunger to achieve but by the sweet pleasures of stopping. I’ve invented motivational jiu-jitsu: I’m using my own laziness against itself.