On Guilt

ATTN. PATRONS, 50m POOL IS SLIGHTLY COOLER TODAY.

‘Only by two degrees -three max’, the lady behind the counter says to my concerned face.  She is looking at me trying to anticipate any sign of the outrage she has likely already experienced from the elderly crowd today. I wonder if the comic sans was deliberate so as to soften the blow of its content, or if perhaps they, the lifeguards, consider comic sans to be an aquatic font.

There is remorse in the lady’s eyes and I want to tell her she is sympathetic for the wrong reasons. I want to tell her the fifty-meter pool isn’t allowed to be slightly cooler today because I just put my dog down.

Four wrinkly legs in too short a short pile in line behind me. The wrinkly legs are jittering me to move my own so I refrain from saying this out loud. I also don’t think the lady behind the counter or the owners of the jiggling legs care for my former jack russel cross terrior; may she rest in peace.

I stand aside for the white shorts while I find my tag at the bottom of my swimming bag. A lotion has spilled conditioning all consistencies slimy. I raise the slimy rectangle tag that tells the lady I am a twenty-one-year-old female, first name Harriet, last name Donegan. She probably skips all this and goes directly to the line that tells her if I have paid for my laps this fortnight. Her remorse fades as she realises she has survived three more customers without voices being raised.

I proceed to the female change.

Moving down the corridor, whose right-facing windows permit one vision of the fifty-meter basin, I notice it is quiet today and the few people that are in buoy up and back quickly. There is seldom steam coming off the surface and watching the wind violently thrashing the tree crowns I am wondering what I am doing here right now.

Inside the ladies’ change, I am slow about the unlooping of my shoelaces. I feel full of grace for treating my shoes this way. I am reminded about a story I read recently where a woman recalls her Dad telling her that to fill the kettle through its spout is a disservice to the soul of the kettle. Sitting on the partly dry, mostly wet wooden slats in the grey ladies change I pledge to from now on consider and service the souls of my shoes. I also pledge to always open the lid of the kettle when filling it. I take this pledge further by attending several years of bad luck to the demurring of these tasks.

A pink lady appears before me in a cloud of steam, she is genie-like but far superior to magic; she might just be the most natural thing I’ve ever seen. The spray of her slogging down her bathers collects on the round of my right cheek. The few droplets are freezing. I jealous over the pink lady post-swim about to towel-dry; to think of how wet I will soon be in the slightly cooler fifty-meter pool. The lady has one milky cataract and is clumsy in the feeding of her leg through the underwear hole. I am reminded of Smudge’s milky cataracts and gone hind legs and the fact that she is dead now.

I undress until I am wearing red speedos that only cover my torso. My skin ripples until it hurts. In consideration of my own soul I lay out my belongings in the order I will need them when I get out. This is to abate the cold and the irrational feelings such temperatures usually incite in me. It is in doing this I learn I am without undies. I turn oh my godly to the pink lady that has just finished putting hers on and realise my expression, out of context, isn’t piteous whatsoever as this lady does not know me or care for my lack of undies or my dead dog. I can still picture all colours of all the undies; double pegged and flapping dry on my washing line. When I un-purse my lips they dye from white to blueberry in the mirror. I take in the image of the woman now squatting under the hairdryer; she wears the expression of what I would imagine overcomes the face when frostbite is being defrosted. No feeling is final, I tell myself. In thirty-five to forty minutes I will be the one wearing this expression.

I put all of my body in the water at once and for the first eight laps list words in an attempt to locate the most antonymous term to pleasant. The water is slightly cooler as much as it is incompatibly retched against my grieving body. If the wind hadn’t have picked up to where it now is: slaughtering everyone and thing in its way, I would march up to the only two degrees, three max lady behind the counter and tell her it’s the coldest water I’ve felt all year. I’d jump behind the counter and hug her cool.

I try to consider breakfast. Which grocer I’ll stop at on my way home. The items I’ll buy and how to include mangoes now they’re in season. In the deep end a huge crown of an old gum, whose trunk is rooted right next to my car on Stanhope Street, puts me in the shade. Beyond the red and green flags the sky looks as though it’s menstruating in black and white. A light rain begins to fall on my face. I think to the undies becoming re-soaked on the washing line. And to how she first came to me in a white crate with the red bow laced around her neck. She didn’t even have a name yet.

The fifty-meter basin is losing it’s aqua blue quality, the consistency feels thick, almost slimy, as it dyes to a cloudy red before my eyes. I have new goggles on, brand new goggles that aren’t tinted like my old ones because the lady at the kiosk said the tinted kind fog. People often say swimming in the rain is euphoric but these drops are assaulting the water. I stop backstroking and float for a moment. The colour of the rain is as if the sky is raining from an artery, it’s a heavy downpour and I wonder if it is god’s aorta. One cannot deny the red nature of the hot rain but everyone else in the water seems un-phased so I continue with my swimming. I tumble-turn and on surfacing the rain has become interspersed with heavy hail. It’s hitting my torso like those plastic pellet guns.

I am struck by the image of my family home’s dinner table. I am filling out a scoresheet. Piles of kings, queens, and aces decorate the table. Cards were the currency of my household growing up. Card games where instead of cash my siblings and I would gamble mandatory tasks and treasured belongings. One day, in the year between my seventh and eighth, I had been losing so badly that I had nothing left to bet. I was adamant about remaining at the table. I remember looking up and around the room and then down to the ball of white fur curled at my feet.

I put her up, my dog, and lost.