Читать книгу The Shallow End - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 6

I was at the Prahran pool. I’d been going there almost every day since I got back from Spain. In Barcelona it was cold and women were wearing fur-collared coats on the beach, but back in Melbourne a hot dry summer was hitting its late December stride. It was perfect weather for hanging out at the pool; lucky really given that swimming laps, working on my tan and being depressed was pretty much all I wanted to do that summer.

I was lying on my stomach with my head turned, absently watching the other people at the pool. This stooge over the other side of the pool was getting changed out of his boardshorts under his towel—you know, like you see surfers do in car parks down at the beach. You don’t see it as often at the pool, where there are perfectly good changerooms just metres away. The stooge was, of course, well built in that hulky, too-big kind of way, so this possibly explains his choice of location.

And I swear, he made a three-act friggin play out of changing out of his boardshorts. His struggles with his slipping towel were masterful, teasing his audience with a glimpse of the top of his lily-white ass, but tantalisingly never dropping the towel completely until he finally tossed it aside (ta da!) to reveal he was wearing a pair of shorts not unlike the boardshorts. It was a modern male version of a fan-dance. When he was finished, some wag in the stands applauded. His mate joined in as did a few others who had been watching. One called, ‘Brava’.

Before I knew it my black dog had been thrown a bone and I actually laughed. Well, it was only a sharp exhalation through the nose, but it was the closest thing to a laugh I’d managed for a good three weeks and it felt incredible. Sure, I still felt like shit, as if I could cry at the drop of a hat, or more specifically at some soppy ad on tele for health insurance, showing a fetching newborn baby and its mother weeping with joy. Yes, this happened to me—I wept for a whole afternoon after watching this ad. But I was also aware that there was, in fact, another angle on the story. I wasn’t OK, but knew I would be again one of these days, and probably soon. With the flick of a switch my old friend perspective, which had deserted me for a while there, was suddenly back at the door looking sheepish for having stayed out on a three day bender. As a result everything seemed so glistening and new, like that slippy newborn baby in the ad.

In that moment of fresh perspective anything seems possible. Of course you realise quickly that ‘anything’ has never really been possible, and is becoming decreasingly possible as you move through your mid-30s, and of course your life is especially shit at the moment, but for those few moments it feels like being 17 and horny again.

—

I didn’t find out until a day or two later, but the same day I had a little trickle of perspective and cracked a smile, at approximately 3.22 pm some guy disappeared from the Prahran pool.

The headline in the newspaper was simply, MISSING SWIMMER. A lap-swimmer had gone missing, had vanished, disappeared. His name was Matt Gray. With a name like that he was asking to disappear really, wasn’t he?

Apparently, according to the paper, this guy got to the pool with his mates in the early arvo, lay in the sun for a bit then went off to do some laps. And that was it. He never came back. All his stuff—his backpack and his towel and his wallet and phone and keys—was left with his friends. He walked away from them to do his laps, wearing only his togs and holding his goggles, and he never came back.

I did have a question. Well, apart from the obvious one like, What the hell happened to him? And would everyone be really embarrassed when he walked in and said, Sorry I was just at the market buying some bagels? No the really big question to my mind was, How the hell could they say that he disappeared at ‘approximately 3.22’? There is nothing remotely approximate about ‘3.22’. And somehow that made it so much more pointed and creepy. None of this, Oh, I don’t know, he wandered off and we didn’t see him around for a while and then, well, there you go, it appears he’s missing. No, none of that. It’s like at 3.22 precisely he simply went up in a puff of smoke.

I hoped it was just some kind of weird muck-up and that he would turn up all innocent and apologetic and wondering what the fuss was all about.

I also wondered what I was doing at 3.22 pm that day. Whether I was swimming laps, or busy watching that guy do his little fan-dance with his towel.

I came to the conclusion that I was probably just lying there in the sun, feeling the sweat tickle down my ribs, with my eyes closed and my mind satisfyingly blank. Chances are.

—

I love the Prahran pool. It’s a beautiful relic. It’s one of those sixties public swimming pools that are dotted throughout Melbourne’s suburbs and are, somehow, as intrinsic a part of their suburbs as the postcode.

The Prahran pool has retained much of its original feel in part due to being adequately maintained enough not to need anything but the most basic repairs over the years. Little injections of botox rather than the full series of disastrous facelifts. It hasn’t become one of those big, anonymous, enclosed ‘aquatic centres’ like a lot of others which all seem very impersonal. No, this one seems like just what it is, a modest little suburban pool in near original condition. In the foyer you can see photos taken on the day the pool opened in the early sixties and there is very little difference to what exists today, except the plants are smaller.

The pool deck is made out of big, square, pebble-mix tiles. The edges of the pool walls are tiled with light blue, ridged tiles, chunky and chipped here and there (chips repaired, I note, with black electrical tape). The pool floor and walls are painted the traditional light blue, but here and there it’s either slightly darker or slightly lighter, where slipshod repairs have been undertaken. The men’s changerooms are largely made out of chunky moulded concrete, smoothed by 40 years of feet and slippery when wet. The windows of the changerooms are that frosted glass with chicken-wire in them.

The pool is book-ended at the north and south by hi-rise council flats. Built around the same time as the pool these towers are monuments to outmoded ideas of public housing and minimalist building methods. Not only in Prahran, these council flats hover, brown and grim, over some of the most popular and expensive streets in inner-suburban Melbourne. Again, due to being adequately maintained but not in any way refurbished, they too retain, resolutely, a feeling of authenticity. Little boxes built out of what could be exactly the same pebble-mix tiles of the pool deck.

When I visit the Prahran pool I kind of wish I could be amongst women in polka dot bikinis and big sunglasses and men in high-waisted buttoned shorts, or even, if I’m lucky, one of those baby-blue zip-up towelling play-suits that Sean Connery wore poolside in Goldfinger. The Prahran pool, on a hot day in midsummer, I feel, should look like that—something really spy-cool from Miami. But of course it doesn’t. The architecture and surroundings may be authentic sixties, but too much has changed and the crowd is essentially, disappointingly modern. Not to mention homosexual. As well as being positioned in the middle of the two council hi-rises, the Prahran pool just happens to also be slap bang in the middle of Melbourne’s gay ghetto. Down Malvern Road, off the corner of Chapel Street and Commercial Road. Melbourne’s G-spot. And on a hot day in the middle of a hot summer you can tell. There are a lot of men preening and posing, but above all perving. It’s quite amusing to trace the different kinds of pervs that are going on at any given moment. He’s looking at him who’s looking at him who’s checking him out—it’s a veritable cat’s cradle of perving.

A couple of summers ago, before I went away to Spain, a friend of mine convinced me to come with him to the pool. It was the first time I’d been and he gave me the low-down on the different areas of the pool with specific regard to homosexual occupation of same. There’s a nice big L of lawn curving around the west and south of the pool, a bit browned off due to the water restrictions, with a couple of lonely-looking palms and scraggly shrubs and trees ranged around the edge. The up and down bit of the L on the west side of the pool is the family area, but the base of the L is, so my mate told me, known as the ‘Pansy Patch’. Whether just to him or in general I don’t know, but sure enough, when I looked down, pansies all in a row. There are bleacher steps all along the east side of the pool, made of concrete and aqua painted boards. The southernmost part of these steps is gay. The northernmost part straight. You don’t think there could possibly be such rigid, strictly adhered to guidelines? Go then, and have a look for yourself.

Above the rooms that house sauna, spa and massage room is a sundeck with plastic moulded banana lounges. This my mate called Club Med, but I prefer calling it the Lido Deck. It’s a mixed area where the harder of the hardcore tanners seem to congregate, with a bit of sneaky nude-ish sunbathing going on every now and then.

So yeah, perhaps that’s another reason I spent so much time at the pool that summer, I admit. Not only did I appreciate this perfect little oasis of sixties kitsch, it was also a great place to do a bit of summer perving on some rather fit homosexual men in a variety of quite revealing swimwear. A single man must take his pleasures where he can.

—

There were a number of regulars I saw at the pool most afternoons. Mobile Mary, a gym-bulked young man who pranced around and around the pool talking on his mobile, or pretending to talk on his mobile. He was very much doing it for attention, though, because I noticed that his phone conversations were louder and funnier when he was parading past some good-looking and appreciative boys (oh how he laughed!) and likewise were pretty much non-existent when he walked past the family section.

Then there were the Rumpelstiltskins. I’d only seen these two a couple of times, but they were a great old couple. They lived over the road in the council flats (they left at the same time as me once and I saw them crossing the road and going home) and they just seemed so magnificently old and wrinkled and slow. He had a bent back, like almost 90 degrees, and she wore horn-rimmed specs with a regal air as if she was maybe a long-lost Russian princess. He would get in the pool in his singlet and just sit there with the water up to his neck. She would swim a few strokes of that old-person breaststroke with her head right out of the water. She would leave her glasses on and her hair didn’t even get wet. Then they would get out and go.

Fat Annie. She had really skinny legs but an upper body like a packet of crumpets. She wouldn’t give way to swimmers faster than her and would do a tumble turn right on top of you if you happened to be in the way. She gave me the shits and I tried not to swim in the same lane as her.

Then there was Red Trunks. I called him that because, no, wait for it, because he wore red swimming trunks. Is there no limit to my creativity? They seemed a size or two too small for him (gratifyingly), but as he was quite heavily built and big, perhaps that was because he bought them when he was a size or two fitter than he currently was. It was the body that could very soon go either way—either he could regain the structure once again and be hot shit, or he could wake up one day with a white pot-belly. You know? He was very business-like in his swimming. He would get in and do his laps, slow and splashy and plodding, then get out and leave. I developed a soft spot for Red Trunks. He wasn’t my usual type, but he was almost the absolute opposite of Spanish Leo and I guess that was the point, right? There had been a glance or two and small nods of recognition pass between us, and given an introduction and an ounce of encouragement, I’d give a fuck a go.

There were others. Not everyone got a name. Not everyone reappeared. Young and old and all shapes and types. With one thing in common amongst the gay boys, dark glasses and baseball caps, eyes hidden but heads alert and scanning, back and forwards back and forwards. Round and round and round. The old cat’s cradle of perving.

I felt like these fellow regulars at the pool were friends. They all had their names and some even got a back story. But the truth is, of course, that I didn’t know these people. I thought I did, in a way, because I saw them every day, and this familiarity led me to make assumptions about what they were like. But there’s nothing to say I was right, or even close. It’s funny, feeling like you know people but knowing you don’t really. We all do it. People you might see on the tram one morning, or workmates you’re not particularly close to but nod at in the lift. Or even people you read about in the paper.

I enjoyed the distance and disconnection of all that pool perving. It suited me that summer. I wasn’t engaged with those people, nothing was expected of me. I barely talked to anyone. I’d say, perhaps, a ‘hello’ to whoever was on the desk when I got there, maybe nod acknowledgement to Red Trunks, but I wasn’t quite there. I’d just swim my few laps, dry off in the sun, read the paper, people-watch. Then I’d go home. It was the next step up from wanting to have showers all the time and stay in bed. Sure, while I was out of the house I may still have been wrapped in my ‘little cocoon of wallow’ (thank you sis) but it was like a scab, where all the healing is going on underneath—you can’t pick it off too early, it has to come up from the edges in its own time, bit by bit, with a lovely little itch.

At one point I thought, I wonder if anyone’s got a name for me. Perhaps there was a people-watcher watching me, and perhaps he or she had a name for me. And a private story.

Anyhow, my pool routine would end with a tram back into town and another round into the Docklands, where I would buy a six-pack, take the lift up to Sharon’s Place and drink enough so that I could sleep through the night.

—

Sharon’s Place is where I was staying that summer. It didn’t actually belong to someone called Sharon. Nor did it belong to me. I was house-sitting.

My last place in Melbourne was a share house in Brunswick. I wasn’t on the lease, and so I could go any time I wanted, and when I did, with only a week notice, they replaced me easily with another renter and so I had nowhere to come back to when Barcelona blew up in my face.

So how did I find myself in a luxurious apartment on the Docklands? The simple truth is that my sister saved my bacon. The truth is often quite lame, I’ve found. She’s in real estate in Sydney, which I can imagine is as fun as going for a paddle in shark-infested waters while someone throws a whole lot of fish guts around you. She’s two years older than me, tough as nails but very hard-love-kind, and I adore her. She married a quiet, unassuming kind of guy who is also quite lovely. In their early 30s they decided to start a family but discovered she couldn’t have kids and ever since then she’s been a fiend for her career.

Anyhow, she apparently knew this fella who was away in the USA and was willing to let me stay there for a bit rent free. He could be back any day, but until then he was happy for me to be there. At least that’s what she told me. My sister, needless to say, is a fucking legend.

Sharon’s Place is in the Docklands development just west of Melbourne. The Docklands used to be old unused sheds and falling down piers, where I remember going to numerous gay dance parties. Now it’s (mostly) colourful apartments and office buildings. The whole of the docklands area feels deserted and unfinished, probably because it is.

It wasn’t a bad apartment, I suppose. It was the type with yucca plants and a water feature in the entry hall and a telescope in the living room. All beige and kind of porny, you know? When I walked in my first thought was, Basic Instinct, w hich is of course why I called it Sharon’s Place, which was also kind of handy since my sister made me swear not to tell anyone who the real owner was. (Not that I talked to anyone from one day to the next, other than the skank at the 7-11 who hates my guts ever since the day I knocked her Skittles display on the ground. Accidentally.) All this secrecy was because the owner was famous—that is if you give a shit about what he does, which I didn’t and don’t. Well, I suppose, even if you don’t you might know who he is. I did the moment she mentioned him.

My sister would crucify me if she knew I was writing about him here. So from now on I’ll just call him X. No. Not X. That’s so been done. Y? No. Make it T… That’s his initial. That’ll do.

Mr T was away from Melbourne a lot and didn’t use the place much. It showed. It was totally soulless and barren. Maybe it was all that beige and Smeg appliances. I kind of wished there was some horrible cheese-encrusted waffle maker thing sitting on the kitchen bench, or milk crates as a bookshelf or some really well-worn something or other. But there were no THINGS anywhere. There were shelves but not things on them.

The whole place, the apartment, plus the Docklands, made me bored and antsy, but at the same time sapped my strength so I could do little but lie around or sleep. There was cable, so there were a million channels but nothing to watch, there was the telescope but I could find nothing to look at. One day I was so bored I just lay on the floor in the middle of the living room. I considered masturbating, but couldn’t be bothered and ended up watching flies circling the light-fitting. They circled each other warily, then suddenly one would make a dive for the other and they’d just spin around each other before separating and going back to gently circling again. This dog-fight went on and on and on for however-long before I got bored and went to the pool.

—

In the days following the disappearance there was a lot in the media about Matt Gray.

The first time the disappearance was reported he was nothing much more than a name and a single line of description, 35-year-old Prahran resident. Then there was more to say about him. Bit by bit we found out he worked as an account manager with a local real estate agent, was born and bred in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and had been a keen swimmer all his life, representing both his school and his university with some success, more recently lap-swimming almost every day to maintain his fitness, but no longer competing. It all made him sound a bit of a yawn.

There were also plenty of details about the day that Matt disappeared, exactly what he said, what he wore, what he did, and when he said and wore and did it. I must admit I scoffed up all these insignificant little details, day after day, like salt and vinegar chips, picking up the crumbs with a licked finger.

On the day of the disappearance Matt’s arrival at the Prahran pool was timed at exactly 1.23 pm. He had a membership card, like I did, and the time he scanned through at the front desk was recorded. The attendants on the desk didn’t remember him coming in, but the computer recorded it to the minute. Once inside Matt changed into his swimwear, went onto the pool deck and joined a couple of friends, named in the paper ‘Paul’ and ‘Gil’, sitting on the aqua steps. He wore green and white striped Speedos, they said, thongs (they think but can’t be sure) and was carrying a backpack and a pair of goggles. He joined them for about 30 minutes, lay on his stomach in the sun and did not contribute to the conversation apart from saying ‘no thanks’ when they asked if he wanted a Diet Coke. Mysterious, hmm? After about a half hour of this, he got up and said it was time to do a few laps. He left his things with his towel laid out on the steps and walked towards the pool. Gil said he watched Matt step onto the edge of the pool and dive into the deep end of the fast lane. Paul wasn’t paying particular notice, but he also remembered Matt diving in. There was no fart-arsing around. He didn’t go anywhere else, just straight to the edge of the pool where he dived in. And from there, quite simply, he didn’t come back.

So where does 3.22 pm come into it? Well, at 3.22 pm precisely (so the call history revealed) Paul received an SMS message from another friend who had finished work early and wanted to see if the boys were at the pool. As Paul’s phone beeped and received this SMS message, Gil was looking at the pool and saw a swimmer do a tumble turn, showing a bum clad in green and white striped bathers. This person (Gil was absolutely positive) was Matt.

‘It was him,’ Gil was quoted as saying in one early interview. It was, apparently, more than just the green and white striped togs. Certainly they were rare and distinctive, but it was more than that, it was everything about this swimmer doing the tumble turn, the skin tone, the hair colour, the sense of the person, the fitness, the tallness. ‘I’m positive it was him. Absolutely positive.’

So, doing a tumble turn in the fast lane at precisely 3.22 pm is the last time Matt (if it was indeed him) was officially seen. By his friends at least. There were, of course, many strangers who came forward after the disappearance to say they had noticed Matt that day at the pool. They saw him doing his laps, they said. Diving in the deep end, they said. They remembered him as the one with the green and white striped togs, they said. One unidentified man was quoted without additional comment as saying, ‘Oh yeah. I saw him. He was quite nice but not my type.’ The timing of these various sightings though was mostly vague, and none of them could be pinpointed as rigidly as Gil’s at 3.22 pm, which became the official ‘last sighting’.

At closing time, when the crowd dispersed and Matt didn’t appear to be anywhere on the premises, his friends Gil and Paul felt there was nothing to do but report it. The police were called. They searched the entire pool grounds and buildings and confirmed that Matt was nowhere to be found. The staff members on the desk that afternoon were interviewed and stated they had not seen anyone matching Matt’s description leave the pool through the front entrance, but they were, they said, very busy and could not swear that he hadn’t. But of course he must have left. There was no other explanation. Although it seemed highly improbable that he would have done so dressed only in green and white striped Speedos.

Matt’s belongings were left on the bleacher steps where his friends had been sitting. His towel, one with thick multicoloured stripes and white fringing at the ends, had remained spread out where he had left it. His backpack was left next to it and contained the rest of his belongings. These included his clothes, underwear, shorts and teeshirt, sunscreen, deodorant, a pair of running shorts and a bottle of water. In a separate zippered section of the backpack was a mobile phone, his watch, his keys and his wallet which contained cash, credit cards, a couple of business cards, an unused Cabcharge voucher, and a public transport ticket. The front pocket also contained his pool membership card as well as a membership card to the Aquatic Centre in Albert Park where he did his laps during winter. So, missing along with Matt were his green and white striped swimwear, his goggles and whatever footwear he had worn to the pool that day.

But what footwear? The two friends said that when Matt emerged from the changerooms and joined them he was wearing thongs. They couldn’t be 100% sure but thought they were white plastic thongs. However, as there were no thongs in Matt’s backpack, or with the rest of the belongings, or as it turned out left anywhere else around the pool, it was presumed they were missing with Matt. However, while Matt may have worn his thongs out of the changerooms and up onto the bleachers, there was no way he would have then worn them swimming. Which was all well and good, except it meant that the white thongs should have been found with the rest of Matt’s belongings, and yet weren’t.

I thought to myself at the time, What’s with this thong thing? It seemed trivial, but in some way that I didn’t have a clue about, those missing thongs seemed especially important. Perhaps it was because they were the only wrinkle in an otherwise ordinary timetable of events? There was no other clue in these chip-crumbs of detail, no indication that something unexpected or extraordinary was about to happen, except for those white thongs, which should have been there but weren’t. Otherwise it was just a normal summer day at the pool with fizzy drinks and SMS messages, usual everyday bullshit stuff. No one saw anything amiss or heard anything amiss, and in the middle of it all Matt Gray was just gone.

I don’t know what I expected; upheavals, with horses eating human flesh and the earth opening up and a sky full of fire and all that stuff? I don’t know. But I suppose you’d like to think that if you were going to just disappear like that there’d be something other than just a pair of white thongs to indicate that something weird had happened.

—

One other thing about all these early articles on the missing swimmer. Many of them were illustrated with the same photograph of Matt. It was a picture that was taken at some work function or other and he looked buttoned up and on his best behaviour, well-built and if not handsome at least regular-featured enough not to be unattractive. He was the type who would certainly have been noticed, especially at the Prahran pool which was, I knew from experience, exactly the place where men noticed other men.

And as I looked at the photo of him, all pixellated the closer I got to it, I became sure that I had also seen him that day at the pool, doing what I couldn’t remember, but just like those other strangers at the pool, I too was sure I had seen Matt Gray.

—

When I first came back to Melbourne from Spain I got a taxi to the address my sister had given me in the Docklands, to Sharon’s Place. I felt like shit, jetlagged and miserable and my stomach and bowels felt horrible.

I got the key from the caretaker’s office and went up and went pretty much straight to the bathroom where I shat and showered, then found the bedroom and went to sleep. For the first few days, that’s pretty much what I did. I had an amazing appetite for hot showers (even though it was hot) and for sleep. Food I ordered in, or just didn’t eat at all. My life, when I thought about it at all during those days, seemed crap, but so solidly and consistently crap that it was, in a way, not as upsetting as it could have been. I mean, when things seem thoroughly bad, they’re the times you think, Oh, well, it’s not as if I can salvage anything here, and you quite happily have another drink and just wallow in it and, I think the phrase is, ‘give up’. That’s how I felt. Jetlagged. Numb. Hot showers and sleep and a dumb feeling that it was better not to think about anything was all I could manage.

Anyway, I remember, it must have been three or four days into this, I woke up and had no idea what time it was or what day, or whether it was even day or night. There was, I could see, a bit of light seeping in around the edges of the curtains but it was very dim and dusky. It was obviously, I thought, either sunrise or sunset, but I had no idea which. I went to the bedroom curtains to open them and check where the sun was. The whole sky was this dark brown colour. I could see where the sun was, this washed out, smudgy, round bit of lighter brown almost directly above. It must have been about one o’clock in the afternoon or something, but it was like a total-sky eclipse in brown. I opened the window a notch and you could smell the air, hot and thick with wood smoke. It didn’t make a single bit of sense to me until I turned on the news and found out that bushfires had been burning in the east of the state for days. On one hand the browned-out sky was ominous and scary, which seemed perfectly appropriate given my mood at the time and the unholy crappiness of my life, but on the other hand I also didn’t give a shit. I just closed the curtains and went back to bed. But you get my point, I think. At least I had the horses eating human flesh, yeah? Matt Gray got a perfect blue sky.