The tipping point
She’s standing on the very edge of the swimming pool, her toes curled around the rim. She’s been standing like that for quite a while.
Everything is still with the special kind of afternoon sleepiness you only get on holidays. Her dad would probably tell her to breathe it all in, that she’s got to store moments like this in her memory, so on a miserable rainy February morning she can call them up and savour them. He’s fond of saying things like that. You’ve got to enjoy life. You won’t be dead for a million years, you’ll be dead forever. A lizard moves quickly in a shadow. She closes her eyes, tries to keep her balance.
All around the pool, the rest of the family snoozes on sun loungers: Auntie June swollen as a beached whale in her slippery swimsuit, and Auntie Sarah, her comic double, bronzen, sinewy body lying prone and oiled in a neon bikini. Baby gurgles to itself under a tree. Everyone is happy. Somewhere in the valley below her dad’s challenging the big boys, Ben and Luke, at table tennis. Best of three. Then five. He did ask her to join them but she decided to stay here, in spite of the boys’ energetic promises to annihilate her. They always get so competitive, her dad has to remind them it’s only a game. Their shouts are lost in the warm air that hovers overhead. Even the water seems like it can only just about be bothered to lap at the edge, as if it’s ready for its siesta too. The sun blinks on the surface.
Any moment now, she’ll jump. She’ll extend her arms over her head, she’ll crouch, she’ll start to tip, at just the right moment she’ll spring, forward, upwards, sail through the air like a superhero, Gemma, champion of the world. And then she’ll cut into her reflection like a knife, so silently she won’t wake her uncle, who is obviously dreaming because his hand is doing this funny twitching thing. The rumbling of his snores lifts and dips the Daily Mail that’s come to rest across his face. Or she might make the smallest splash as she disappears beneath the surface, the tiniest trail of bubbles in her wake, a vanishing merperson. Any moment.
But for now she’s contemplating the water. It’s really deep. It’s impossible to see the bottom, it just goes murky blue. In fact one year she came running, shouting that she’d seen something down there, something big, definitely seen it, cried when no one believed her. But she’s too old for that kind of nonsense anymore. She sighs. Flexes her toes around the rim.
She’s at her most gorgeous when she’s lost in thought. Propped up with a book in the window seat at home. Or glimpsed through the patio door, balancing her way along the garden wall on tiptoes, sucking a loose strand of hair. If she could just stay standing there like that. Puberty has come on suddenly, unannounced, swelling her hips and around her nipples. But she has her tummy sticking out in front of her, that way that kids have. Her dark curls are wild with sun and chlorine, a mess, Stig of the Dump.
Her dad has been teaching her how it works, how you have to think about transferring all of your weight into your head, and then you start to tip. There will come a point where gravity takes over and it’s not up to you whether you want to fall or not, you just do. But before that comes a split second decision: to let go. And that’s the bit she’s been struggling with. You can do it if you really want! He likes to sing to her, out of tune and not caring. She doesn’t even get embarrassed.
(This will pass, this magical way they have of absorbing the hours with passions shared by just the two of them. They have created their own universe, long bike rides down the old railway track, afternoons in the potting shed making things grow, late night episodes of Match of the Day. It would be easy to be jealous of it, how natural they are with each other. They never behave as if the time is fleeting.)
She begins to stretch her arms over her head, hands pointed into an upturned heart. The muscles move beneath her skin; the fabric of her costume touches her ribs, amber light catches in her lashes. She is breathtaking.
If she could have any gift it would be this. To always bear her beauty so lightly. There’s a time to come of Wonderbras and Spanks, shoes that give blisters, anxiety about carbohydrates, alcohol drunk to still inhibitions. They are coiled in her future. But for now she’s just so, so perfect. To always carry her beauty like a child. And if the beholder could have just one gift it would be to keep her here. Already there’s a struggle beginning for freedoms that are not easily given up. It’s always left to the mother to put her foot down, to be the baddie. But the world has changed in ways that are frightening, and a parent has to be on guard. Her dad is right: moments like this are to be savoured.
Trundling up the hill come the big boys. They smash the dome of quiet that has formed over the pool. How nasty boys can be, how brutish. What a blessing to have a daughter.
“Hey, look at you, fatty, are you pregnant or something?” The first one shouts, waking everyone up. He points his finger at her accusingly; “Are you having a baby?”
She looks puzzled, but Luke sticks his stomach out, digs his thumbs into his coccyx, starts waddling around the pool. Ben, unnoticed, has moved behind her, and, whilst she stands transfixed and confused by Luke’s performance, he comes running up behind her, a spiteful grin frozen on his face.
The way the shove comes- when she’s standing with her centre of gravity at her middle, when she isn’t ready- it’s clear that this will be a belly flop; a painful one. Her limbs flail out around her, she grabs at the thin air. A wave passes across the water’s surface and her reflection looms, distorted. She looks up with an expression full of terror, from which she cannot possibly be saved. She reaches the tipping point. She falls.
No comments:
Post a Comment