‘Lifeguarding city pools is easy,’ Josh told her as she stood, backpack clutched to her chest, on the matte brickwork paving outside the health club. ‘You sit on your arse for six hours, test the water every now and then and put up with Rene’s Mussolini complex. It’s just the triathlon set and bankers here. Quit when you go to uni.’
He nudged Alex with his elbow, creating enough movement for the curved glass doors of the building to notice them and slide open. A rush of temperature control, new carpet and fitness class brochures rushed out, and Josh nudged her again.
‘Easiest money you’ll ever make,’ he said, and she walked into the building.
You sit on your arse; you make peanuts. You stare at the long red sword-like arm on the pace clock at the far end of the pool as it glides around, and around again, its white face lit alternatively with red and blue from the coloured wall of lights behind your high guard’s chair. They are trying to invoke night clubs, wine bars, Virgin Atlantic. The soundtrack hovers between hot stone massage and industrial techno. You believed the hype for a week, before the reality that you were in the chlorinated bowels of a King’s Cross basin basement became more apparent. You are alone for hours, counting the number of strokes it takes bankers to complete every length and, after nearly a year, the average is eighteen, just like you. Easy money. Never been simpler. Eleven months. You know the patrons by name by the time eleven months have gone by.
She didn’t call them little shits, but that was how it was reported, and the phrase was repeated so many times that it had become true even to her own ear. Alex Maclane, Mrs. Cuthwine had written in bubbly handwriting on the health club complaints form, misspelling her surname, blew her whistle at my children and called them “Little Shits.”
Alex did herself no favours by laughing when the pool manager Rene showed her the note, his outrage manifesting in a twitching moustache and wobbling lip.
‘This isn’t funny!’ he shouted, spittle catching in bristling facial hair, and she shook her head, raising her hand, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I actually didn’t call them little shits… it’s just, it made me laugh…’
‘This is not funny!’ he shouted again, waving the complaints form. ‘This is Mrs. Cuthwine!’
And while it was true that Alex McLean did not call Mrs. Cuthwine’s children little shits, she would have been justified in doing so. For the third time that week, the Cuthwine clan had descended upon the pool, introducing their wrath to the Family Swim area. As if to labour the fact that Mrs. Cuthwine was a former surf lifesaving star in her native Devon, she still wore an ageing rash vest instead of a traditional swimming costume, and her two children wore full-body SPF50 suits despite the pool being indoors, the city being London and the month being December.
The Cuthwine’s primary goal when they entered a body of water, with bright smiles that too obviously doubled as smirks, was to clear the area of other people as quickly as possible. And they did so with the precision of a QC dismembering a defendant in the dock, acutely aware of every rule on the noticeboard beside the changing rooms, and knowing how to flout them. No bombing, no diving (a jump into the water is neither). No inflatables (the kickboards they brandished were not inflated; their egos otherwise). No running (the children had perfected an Olympic racewalk technique that was definitely more dangerous than a jog). No rough play. It was the last violation on which Alex landed on Thursday afternoon, as Tilly Cuthwine picked up her younger brother Bradley and threw him into the plastic lane rope, where his flailing arms caught a lap swimmer’s elbow as she passed.
‘Hey!’ Alex shouted, blowing her whistle. ‘Tilly and Bradley, come over here now please!’
Of course, they didn’t, turning their sulking faces to their mother. Mrs. Cuthwine’s smile had not dissipated.
‘So sorry, Alex, a rush of blood to the head!’ she called back, immediately diving underwater to complete several of her strange bottom-up breaststroke manoeuvres. Smirks readorned, the children reestablished eye-contact with Alex on her lifeguard’s chair.
‘No Tilly,’ Alex said, addressing the child. ‘Please come over here now.’ With her mother still underwater, Tilly laughed.
‘Fuck off, Alex,’ she replied.
‘Yeah fuck off,’ said Bradley.
‘Hey,’ Alex snapped. Ten year old Tilly Cuthwine was barely over half her age, and seven pounds an hour was not enough to tolerate being sworn at. ‘There’s no swearing and there’s no rough play. This is your last warning.’
Mrs. Cuthwine emerged from the water some metres away from her kids.
‘Love you lovelies!’ she called to them, a refrain the family liked to holler at each other in between terrorising patrons. And Alex had talked herself down, naively assuming that was the end of it, and reassuring herself that seven pounds an hour was good enough only to ensure nobody was irreparably maimed, not to actually care about the behaviour of Tilly, Bradley, or Mrs. Cuthwine.
‘I could say the same for you, Alex,’ Mrs. Cuthwine said on her way out of the pool fifteen minutes later, surf-stained costume sagging over her hips, chest high and chin jutted upwards to meet Alex's elevated gaze in the lifeguard’s seat. ‘This is not the end of the matter.’
‘I really didn’t call them little shits,’ she said to Rene, her initial amusement fading into a sick pit somewhere below her sternum as she processed the notion of a she-said/she-said with the family. ‘They hurt another swimmer, and Tilly swore at me. Her mother was underwater.’
‘It hardly matters now, does it?’ Rene said. ‘You should know by now never to interfere with the Cuthwines.’
Alex was an idiot. It radiated off of Rene, whose belly overhung the dishevelled khaki trousers he wore instead of billowing red lifeguard shorts. He thought she was an idiot, and she knew it, watching him cajole the leaking coffee pot, scalding water flecking angrily onto his yellow lifeguard shirt. He knew she would rather be somewhere else, and he knew that in time, she would be somewhere else, somewhere better, while he would still be there. She was going to be accepted to Goldsmiths next September. Of that, there was little doubt, but he still thought she was an idiot and she knew all this with a sad certainty. He had no loyalty to his staff, especially not those whose careers would take them far beyond the gym.
Born and raised near King’s Cross station, Alex’s social status sat somewhere between native Londoner and product of gentrification. She felt this no more keenly than as an employee of an expensive health club beside the mammoth international train station, where memberships started at just over one hundred pounds a month. She was granted the dignity of making minimum wage. She had moulded her accent into something approximating middle class anonymity, but her mother spoke with a London lilt that peppered Alex’s speech from time to time. They lived together in a one-bed flat above a cocktail bar on Islington Park Street and they always had, her mother having owned the property since 1983. There were no dads, no boyfriends, no particular families of concern besides Alex’s grandmother in Watford. She knew, rather pointedly from classmates and the media and the blooming, booming population around her and below her in the bar, and underneath her chair at the health club, that people like Alex and her mother had largely been pushed out of central London a generation ago. They were on the precipice, with just enough nostril exposed above the high water mark to stay afloat. The tiny flat, whose brickwork was crumbling onto the pavement below, and whose living room had been a second bed for eighteen years, was valued at just over half a million pounds. Her mother would never sell it.
She could have been a waitress at any one of the bars within a few hundred metres of her home. Upper Street cascaded by, yards from the door. But Josh, one year above her at school and her closest friend on the local swimming team until he went to university, told her, Alex, it’s easy money, lifeguarding. You just sit on your arse.
The disciplinary procedure was in play, and had to be followed. Mrs. Cuthwine would make sure of it, even if Rene hadn’t been happy to upend his day and punish Alex, which he certainly was. In one of the club’s conference rooms, he presented Alex with the training materials she had been given upon her employment eleven months earlier. A qualified lifeguard since the age of fifteen, she was not to be evaluated in water safety, first aid or CPR, but would instead be taken painstakingly through the minutiae of human resources pedantry and client relations. In contrast to when this was originally presented to her, it would now be delivered personally and condescendingly by Rene. Her shift started at three and lasted until closing, so he had her come in at ten in the morning.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ he said to her as they began. ‘But she will have us both fired if I don’t.’
An exaggeration, maybe. Even Mrs. Cuthwine didn’t wield the sort of power that could put paid to unionised employment that easily. But she could do a lot worse than let her children bomb lane swimmers and encourage their lies, and she would put them all through retraining if it suited her. Bethan Cuthwine, former North Devon board rescue surf lifesaving champion, was the daughter of the club’s founder and chairman. She sat on the board of the club’s parent company, and had been a trustee at Alex’s secondary school until a year ago.
‘If you had actually called them little shits,’ Josh had said on the telephone from Bristol, ‘you’d have been fired on the spot.’
They knew she’d said nothing of the sort, but somebody had to pay for the children’s feral behaviour, and it wasn’t going to be them. Two hours had passed, during which Alex had watched two human resources videos, read the corporate office’s propaganda booklet about the Granfield Active Leisure Group Family, and been quizzed by Rene on the intricacies of chemical safety in pool plant rooms. Her guts were aching from hunger and the gnawing revolt that came with drinking bad coffee on an empty stomach. The conference room stank of their bitter caffeinated breath, Rene’s spittle flicking into his moustache as he recited the last of the chemical spill protocols. There was a sharp click, and the door of the conference room opened.
‘Bethan!’ Rene said, standing up. She was wearing three-quarter length green tights and a running jacket, carrying a drink from the club’s cafe. A branded rucksack was strewn casually over one shoulder.
‘Mr. Longman,’ she replied, and he flushed. ‘I thought I’d pop in and see how the session was progressing.’
Her green trainers made no sound on the carpet as she strode towards Alex, who was usually safely stowed in her raised chair and had rarely been at floor level with her. At least four inches shorter, she felt herself shrink away as Mrs. Cuthwine sat down, reaching across to spin around the assembled materials.
‘Chemical safety!’ she crowed, rifling through the paperwork. ‘I do assume, Rene, that you’ve covered appropriate language and safeguarding of minors already?’
‘I did, we… We have,’ he said, a bristling mess of throat clearing and shirt tucking. ‘Alex is, she’s much better versed… on appropriate ways to. Ah, aren’t you Alex?’
The pair turned on her, Mrs. Cuthwine leaning backwards slightly in her chair, head tilted.
‘Well go on then,’ she said. ‘What have you learned today?’
I sit on my arse; I make peanuts. I stare at the long red sword-like arm on the pace clock at the far end of the pool as it glides around, and around again. I believed Josh for a week, before the reality that I was the last line of defence between management and a drowning lawsuit became more apparent. I am alone for hours, counting the number of strokes it takes bankers to complete every length and, after nearly a year, I have become an emotional plaything for you, Mrs. Cuthwine, whom you can scold in lieu of disciplining your little shits, whom I religiously refer to as your children. Easy money. Never been simpler. Eleven months. I know the patrons by personality disorder by the time eleven months have gone by.
‘It’s been very educational,’ she replied, not granting either of them a smile. Just the rote answers, picking the right gaping circle in the multiple choice test in which to scribble an angry mark. ‘I’ve learned a lot.’
‘And is there anything you’d like to say to me?’ Mrs. Cuthwine asked. Alex had known it was coming. The key to finishing the humiliation; to being allowed lunch. To being reinstalled on the guard’s chair. She is at the dentist, wincing under the pliers. At the chemist, turning away from the jab. Rip off the plaster.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. ‘I won’t do it again.’
But it’s never been about health, she thought, alone again poolside at quarter past four. Nobody here cares much for their health. They care about being bigger, thinner, faster, richer. The board and management care about profit, not the wellbeing of northeast London.
One, two three, breathe, four, five six: she counted the slapping strokes of a man in the medium speed lane, chunky hand paddles slicing the purple-tinged water as the wall of lights behind him morphed from red to blue. Seventeen, eighteen, and flip. He crossed his ankles as he turned, a somehow feminine flare to his otherwise boxy, dogged swimming routine. He was the only person in the water. Five, six, seven, and from the opposite side of the pool, Tilly Cuthwine emerged from the locker room, followed by her mother.
The pool would remain almost empty for another hour, with no swimming lessons scheduled and the workday not yet over. There were six lanes in the twenty-five metre pool and they were labelled with large plastic boards at each end. Lanes one and two were open for play, while the four remaining lanes were designated fast, medium, slow and aqua jogging. Mother and daughter maintained saccharine eye contact with Alex as they rounded the pool, stopping in front of the occupied medium lane. Waiting until the man was nearing the end of the length, Tilly jumped into the water directly in front of him.
The man stopped short, rearing backwards from the tumble turn he had been about to complete. Tilly shrieked and feigned shying away, a bubbly shuffle to the side of the lane accompanied by a terrified look at the bewildered man, who swung himself around and swam away with a degree of annoyance. Pointedly, Tilly and Mrs. Cuthwine looked at Alex.
All three of them knew, as per the pool rules on the plastic sign near the locker rooms, that Tilly had done nothing “wrong”. There was no rule that said a swimmer entering the pool had to choose an empty lane, even though all the others were indeed unoccupied. There was no rule that said a swimmer mustn’t enter the water in front of another, even unexpectedly. These things were assumed; they were etiquette and common sense that nobody had thought to write down. Alex held Mrs. Cuthwine’s mockingly expectant gaze. This was the way it was going to be. Thirty-five strokes later, the man returned to Tilly at the end of the pool. Before he completed his last stroke and his turn, Tilly launched herself into the water in front of him, emulating her mother’s wide-legged, obstructive breaststroke. She was nominally on the left-hand side of the lane, adhering to the instruction to swim anticlockwise. But her kicks were too violent to give the man room to safely pass her. He stopped short again, turning to Mrs. Cuthwine whose legs dangled into the pool. Before he could say anything, she too slipped under the water and pushed off. At the far end, the pair stopped. They waited for the man to catch up to them, before cutting him off once more. Again, he stood up.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, motioning in Alex's direction. ‘Is there something you can do about this please?’
And that was the vice, the trap, the rock and the hard place. She was frozen on her perch, presumed all-powerful by the man with the paddles and the delicate flip-turn who indignantly awaited her response, and known to be powerless by the aggressors. Faceless and anonymous under his wrinkled swimming cap and large blue goggles, she wanted to tell him. But he wouldn’t understand.
‘Ah, miss?’ he jabbed a paddle in the direction of Tilly and her mother, who’d reached the other end of the pool again and were waiting as expectantly as the man. ‘There are five other lanes free.’
She slid her body in its baggy red shorts over the edge of the metal chair and dropped down to the pool deck. In a bizarre standoff, the three people in the water watched her approach. Reaching the side, she was almost embarrassed by the absurd silence in the otherwise empty chamber that housed the pool. No rhythmic splashing from swimmers’ strokes, no children playing, not even the spa pool was running its bubbles, and the canned techno seemed to be muted by a thick fug of hostility settling on top of the water.
‘I don’t know if you saw that,’ the man began again, stammering now, the expected order of events not unfolding as it had done in his imagination. In his head, Alex saw, she walked to the end of the pool and told the Cuthwines to move lanes. In his head, she explained the basic rules of lap swimming etiquette. In his head, they turned their noses up but they complied. In his head, Mrs. Cuthwine was just another clueless patron who left her common sense locked away in the changing rooms. In his head, Alex still had a job.
‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do,’ Alex said, addressing the man. Mrs. Cuthwine smirked.
‘I mean, they can swim anywhere else… I don’t see why I should move?’ the man replied, still reading from a thoroughly obsolete script. ‘I was here first and they nearly kicked me. The girl almost pushed off the wall underneath me. Everyone knows you don’t do that, it’s dangerous.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex repeated. The Cuthwines had put their goggles on again while the man had taken his off: a sign that the battle was won. ‘But these two have never had any fucking manners, and they’re only doing this to wind me up. Her mum owns the gym and I just got retrained for telling her little shits to behave. You’re on your own, mate.’
Which was how Alex McLean got a job waitressing at Chez Rotonde, a quarter of a mile away on the Regents Canal.
It’s not easy money. You don’t just sit on your arse.
The run-up to Christmas was afoot, and the four o’clock sunsets descended upon the overly-lit King’s Cross development. The restaurant strung fairy lights around its high windows, heat lamps gathering like smokers on the deck outside, overlooking the water. Alex relished the absurdly high-waisted trousers and tailored white shirt, collar adorned with a deliberately carefree neckerchief, fashioned as a bowtie. The sweat that beaded on her nose was borne of exertion rather than chlorinated humidity, but Christmas crowds were jolly and leftover wine was plentiful and the air smelled of truffles and garlic, not bleach. Every night saw a different Christmas party stumble through the venue: Macmillan, the Guardian, Tesco big-wigs, Tottenham Hotspur management. Her mother noted the difference: Alex came home exhausted and delirious, but not despondent or square-eyed. And then on the twentieth of December, the Granfield Active Leisure Group appeared on the agenda as the evening’s Christmas function.
‘That’s the place that just fired me!’ Alex whispered, frantic, to a coworker as they looked over the day’s schedule. ‘Or they didn’t really… but there was this woman who had it out for me, and I told her to do one…’
‘Honestly, don’t worry about it,’ her colleague replied. ‘They don’t even look you in the face.’
The Christmas party timetable was militarised, ensuring maximum expenditure on the part of the guests but minimal need for script deviation. Although Alex was new, the routine was not difficult. A conveyor belt of hors d’oeuvres and boozy flutes circled the room, which was mostly full of people Alex didn’t recognise. Owned by the Leisure Group, the gym itself didn’t employ many staff senior enough to be invited to the company party, besides Mrs. Cuthwine. The party guests were not the type to be seen often on the gym floor, but the Group’s headquarters occupied the offices in the floors above the club.
Service was well underway by the time Alex picked her out of the crowd. She must have arrived late, striding onto the wide mezzanine an hour after the event started. Her dress approximated flapper chic, thick black and white swing coat quickly discarded and broad shoulders readily embraced by her peers. Even in the boxy heels the waitstaff wore, Alex felt as short and flat as she had in flip-flops poolside, watching Mrs. Cuthwine’s graceful glide to her next position of attack.
She wondered if she was fortunate enough to be disguised: at the pool, she’d worn her hair in a rough ponytail, whereas it now sat slicked into a ballerina’s bun. She was made up, bronzed and rouged to play the part of the beautiful yet anonymous help. Even her eyebrows were combed and whipped into place, but she was also the person Bethan Cuthwine had observed and judged and played with for a year. She was still Alex McLean, even if her shirt was pressed and her shoes shone.
Chickpea and goat’s cheese sausage rolls arranged on a platter, she skirted the room, coming far too late to the realisation that Mrs. Cuthwine had spotted her, too. She was being followed, a slow motion pursuit through the suits and boots of Generation X’s finest corporate fitness professionals, all of whom wanted the vegetarian option. The restaurant lived up to its name, with a curved main dining room whose windows overlooked a similarly arc-shaped terrace. Her route took her towards the windows, and around to a door to the back of house that would mark her escape. Just like the plant room or staffroom or retraining conference room should have done, but never did. Mrs. Cuthwine could not cross her employee borders now, and as the last sausage roll left her platter she made her move but Bethan was quick, even in heels.
‘Alex,’ she said, sliding in front of the platter as it led the way to safety. ‘I didn’t expect to run into you again so soon, although I’m rather surprised someone with your demeanour has found a home in hospitality.’
There was a place on the tip of her tongue, quite literally despite the colloquialism, where Alex kept the things she’d have liked to say to Bethan Cuthwine. Her hand twitched under the empty platter, fingertips already expert at keeping it aloft with its changeable load. In her mouth, she pressed her tongue into her teeth and bit down on the words. The Granfield Active Leisure Group had not fired her; she had quit. But Chez Rotonde would, without question, and fear struck Alex for the first time. The woman would not leave her alone, ever. They lived within half a mile of each other, the Cuthwines occupying a two-point-eight million pound semi-detached property near the library where Alex’s mother worked. Estate agent’s photos of the house had circulated the lifeguards’ WhatsApp group earlier in the year, when the family had been involved in a planning permission row with the council, and Alex had marvelled at the split-level dining area, the floating staircase, the sauna and substantial city garden. All the boards and trusts and leadership teams, all the charities and advisory councils and corporate partnerships: as Alex scanned the smiling face, sizing up the curt pixie haircut and shimmering cheekbones, the horror of being preyed upon by someone of this stature flopped like wet cement into her stomach.
‘It’s nice to see you again too, Bethan,’ she said, and made haste for the kitchen.
Her colleague found her crying behind stacks of bread flour, neckerchief in hand. It was too much to relay through tears: the smiles that had turned into laser glares over the year, the precision of the children’s behaviour, yearning for reprimand, the lies. There was something predatory about the invasion of space, the way she would front up to the guard’s chair and the way she had slid into the seat on the day Alex was retrained. Her colleague couldn’t be expected to understand, but she held Alex's shoulders regardless and said the right things.
‘Stay back here and help with prep,’ she advised. ‘I’ll vouch for you. If she tries anything, I’ll say I was there and you didn’t tell her to sit and spin.’
There was plenty to do behind the safety of the employees’ door, and with her tears wiped away and neckerchief exchanged, she poured glass after glass of bubbles until her thumb cramped and her shoulder ached. As the evening wore on, her colleagues’ energy began to wear out, tray after tray of wine and pint after pint pulled from the bar denoting the Granfield Active Leisure Group as the drunkest Christmas patrons so far that year. And they told Alex, whose previous employment had spread by word of mouth throughout the staff, this was not unexpected.
‘The sports and fitness people are always the worst for booze,’ the most senior bartender told her. ‘I’ve sent four whisky sours to that woman who gave you grief, and she lifts flutes every time the girls go by, too.’
The notion of a drunk Mrs. Cuthwine initially sounded curious, but Alex knew it would be morbid curiosity at best and it wouldn’t end well for her, were they to cross paths after hours of whisky and wine. The colleague who’d found her behind the flour agreed, and as the evening wound towards closing, advised Alex to leave by a side entrance and avoid the customers. They’d had no complaints, she said. You’ve probably got away with it, Alex. Maybe you’ll never see her again.
Which was how Alex McLean came to cross the water to the canal towpath at midnight. Her walk home was just over a mile and her mother worried about her on the path so late, but the nearby Granary Square was heaving with Christmas parties, and in her eighteen years as a local, she’d never come into any trouble. The restaurant’s wharf ended beyond the outdoor terrace, turning sharply into the Battlebridge Basin. She would pass on the canal’s opposite bank, looking over at tealights flickering on the outdoor tables, and smoke rising from the chimneys of narrowboats moored in the water beyond. Later, when she recalled the scene, the lights in the restaurant were dimmer than they should have been and the area was deserted. Where were the closing staff, and what about the cleaners? On her side of the canal, there were no revellers heading east to the bars at Angel, nor west to the train station. There were no homeless people striking up conversation, and no shift workers on late night dog walks. There were not even any smokers on Chez Rotonde’s terrace, keeping pace with the narrowboats, only one figure (although it might have been a false memory because surely the first thing she noticed was the splash), swaying like a gaunt winter birch beside the restaurant’s squatly potted shrubs.
And here we are in the space between then and when. Her conscious mind analysed none of it, as by design. Instinct is liminal and timeless. The first thing you should do if you fall into water is kick off your shoes. Competitive swimmers sometimes train in sneakers because it makes controlling the water so much more difficult. Alex kicked her shoes off while still standing beside the canal.
Reach or throw. You do not go. The lifeguarding mantra. Entering the water oneself is a last resort. A round plastic box on the terrace opposite contained a lifebuoy. The terrace was still deserted. Her voice was loud and sharp in her own ears shouting, hey! hey! help! at nobody, as she stripped off her coat and flung it away. She searched the unlit wall behind her frantically, looking for a float, a water ring, a rope. Anything. There was nothing there.
Very cold water is terribly dangerous. Shock alone can be fatal. They trained for this, shrieking and gasping for respite, at the open water ponds on Hampstead Heath and the Parliament Hill Lido. She’d become soft, said Josh on occasion, guarding a temperate 29 degree health club pool. Sometimes, she took cold showers on full blast to remind her body what nine degrees felt like. She knew how it would feel, in trousers and a starched shirt. And maybe she had indeed seen the softly swaying birch, black and white and bony fingered, falling into a railing that wasn’t there, because she knew who was in the water.
The canal is dark. Putrid. Two hundred years old. The black and white coat is floating like the green algae that coagulates outside the restaurant, still there as an intrusive thought, ever present in Alex’s mind as it was the moment she thought she’d seen death. But then it began to thrash, sodden wool over fussy straps, grasping at air and night and concrete dock that was too far away. In the low light from the restaurant, it began to sink. The cold struck Alex in the chest like a king-hit from an irate giant, forcing her airways almost closed and sending panic shooting into her limbs. Nothing in her years of training had played out like this, but muscle memory took hold and she swam across the Regents Canal towards the frothing, sinking figure.
‘Take it off,’ she shouted. Her voice was tight and hoarse, more of a stout gasp than a shout, as she moved behind the coat and its submerged body. Alex had to go under and lift, but the coat was now better than a brick at dragging its owner under, and it would drag Alex down, too. She pulled on fabric, desperate to reveal an arm, a waist around which she could wrap her arms and lift the torso high enough for shoulders to be exposed and airways to be open. Wrapped in the dense wool, the arms and body thrashed again and the coat’s owner screamed, coughed, gulped, her mouth falling below the surface again, as again Alex shouted, ‘Bethan take off the coat, it’s going to drown you!’
Still behind her, Alex managed to free the shoulders and pull it away, grappling with the heaving body to wrap it and lift and begin to kick. The side of the canal was smooth and uniform, free from steps, and although Alex estimated she’d be able to pull her own body out of the water, the inebriated Bethan had no hope of doing the same. However, twenty metres away, the York Street bridge Alex had crossed not five minutes earlier spanned the water. If there was any hope of finding a deviation in the concrete side, it was there. She spun Bethan’s body in the water and began a whip-kick backwards, towing them towards the bridge. Bethan writhed, struggled, her head turning violently. The training was fading, fighting against fear and anger. Alex’s voice still came out as a painful bark.
‘Stop fighting me. It’s twenty metres. You will take us both under.’
Bethan coughed again, shrieked, gasped. She didn’t stop resisting.
‘Stop fighting me!’ Alex said again, desperately searching the cement bank. And then she saw it: a square hole cut out of the brutalist blocks, one on either side of the canal. She kicked faster, cramp sudden and agonising along the bottom of her left foot. Seven metres, six… she took skin off as she grabbed at the cold stone but it was skin on dry land.
Her shins were cut to pieces under her trousers by the time she’d pulled Bethan, who was equally grazed and bruised, onto the brick paving. By then, they had been noticed by pedestrians on the bridge and ambulances were summoned, exclamations were made, horror and terror were expressed and none of them knew, none of them would ever know. Alex sat, wrapped in a stranger’s jacket and shawl, against the bridge. Blue lights spun slowly on the faces of the paramedics from the vehicles parked on the street above. They transferred a space-blanket-clad Bethan onto a stretcher and wheeled her up the paved ramp to street level.
‘I’m a trained lifeguard,’ she said to a woman in a green jumpsuit who squatted next to her and laid a hand on her shoulder, but she was beset with hysterical sobbing before the paramedic could reply, and bundled into blankets of her own.
For some time, it will be three in the morning and as revellers file past at the Upper Street intersection, Alex will wake up in the yellow lamplit twilight of an inner city flat. For eighteen years, sounds from the roads below had served as white noise, but she found herself shuffling to the window and pushing the curtain aside to look. She never saw anyone fall, even if only into the shrubbery outside the terraced houses next door. And she would grapple with the question of why she had trained as a lifeguard at all, if not to save somebody, some day. Her instructors had certainly spoken about it at length. And she hadn’t been dismissive; it wasn’t that she hadn’t listened. She understood the etymology of the job title. Life. She watched the drunks stumble away. Guard. And her resentment grew, pummelling anxiety between her ears. It was more to take on than she’d wished. And all the same, she understood that she had no right to demand that the job be clean or righteous, plucking a cherubic child who was not a little shit from an inch-too-deep play pool. As she listened to the drunken revelry recede, she thought about pain and complexity, about the myth of dignity, about shit-stained, ugly, complicated mess.
Never once did Bethan Cuthwine contact her. It came mostly as a relief. She saw the woman only once more before she moved for university. It was midsummer and Alex was sitting on the astroturfed steps below Granary Square, metres from the canal, with her now-former classmates, a pale ale between her twirling fingers. With Bradley and Tilly in tow, Bethan passed by on the path below and Alex was sure their eyes met in the type of split second in which shoes could be kicked, coats could be flung, footings could be lost. Then she was gone, passing under the footbridge and disappearing into the July crowds, almost steady on her feet, pulling her children gently away from the edge of the water.