Ground(l)ing

Tooting Leisure Centre.
The pool.
I was 12.
A Saturday afternoon unfolding under a vague sky.
Squeals bouncing between the walls.
Roguish dads turning themselves into tight bombs for thrilling splashes.
'Games' more vicious than playful.
Best to avoid the sharking packs of teenagers. Wide berth.
The very real threat of verrucas again.
Armbands like strange florescent growths.
Yelps floated high above us; became stretched, were suspended just below stinging bright lighting.
Me, my 'girlfriend' and her three, assured pals. Multi-coloured braces across their teeth.
Splashing.
Me, in Donald Duck swimming shorts (ironic or earnest? Mum-purchased or me-purchased?)
Squealing.
All of us, all five of us doing a good job of pretending not to be frightened by our own green, slippery, unpredictable bodies.
Dunking.
Bubbling.
Bubbling and water up your nose is a Bunsen burner's upright flame.
A Saturday. I was 12.
I drowned.

*

Ground(l)ing

Everyone ‘knows’ that black people and swimming are oil and water.
Swimming: A language that does not come easily to me.
My arms and legs could not, cannot translate barked teacher-instructions about strokes, crawling.
The limbs remain dumb, resist.
And yet there I was, that Saturday. Doing my best. Taking part. Being bold. Obscuring ‘weakness’ with a thin smile and well timed splash. Being a brave boy. Being a boy for my ‘girlfriend’.
I giggled uneasily when the ‘girlfriend’ giggled in the spray - attempted echo of her confidence.
I would be fine.
I would stick to the shallows.
I would keep things brief.
As quickly as I could, I would say I wanted to go to Nandos; say I’d pay for the girlfriend’s lunch with my pocket money.
Surely that would have her leaping out onto terra drier soon rather than later.
I giggled uneasily when the ‘girlfriend’ giggled in the spray - attempted echo of her confidence.
Deeper wading in now.
Pulled by – towards? - something. (Faulty, youthful sense of invincibility? Hopefulness?)
Little 12 year old heart thudding and fluttering beneath the surface.
Thickening waters.
Deeper wading.

*

Ground(l)ing

Myths talk of and lay blame with sirens but I can confront my own wobbling reflection.

*

What came next exists only as some stuttered, cropped snapshots of feeling.
A pulling.
A sharp and stubborn pulling - stabbing? - on my leg.
A darkening.
A quietening down.
Down. Down.
Eruption and irruption: A man’s dripping face over my dripping one. A man, over me. His frantic hair swaying over my eyes. Dark, stringy drapes. His relief and terror and relief. His twitching smile. The shape of his shoulders and the discipline of his torso. His twitching smile. His relief and terror and joy as I formed broken words and spoke. My shoulder blades against cold, ridged tiles. Breath and breathing alien to me; stuttered and staggered and painful to me. His twitching smile.
A vision, a premonition of ripples, ripples, ripples.