The Drying Rooms - Chapter Seventeen

A Little Fish

Me in our pool in Bahrain

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Audio version of Chapter Seventeen

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I can’t remember learning to swim. Maybe it was in Istanbul when I was two. In the summers, we moved from the sweltering heat of Ankara to the cooler shores of the Bosporus, where we lived in the embassy yalı, a wooden mansion with a garden that met the water.

She can’t remember that yalı. And over forty-five years of visits to Istanbul, she has never tried to identify it. Yet every time she takes the ferry past those beautiful bygone houses, with their shutters and large, light rooms, she has a yearning. It is as if an unreachable parallel life is awakened and she is overcome with melancholy. Or rather, she prefers to think of the Turkish word, hüzün, in which the melancholy is enriched by sweet sadness, remembrance, and deep loss in the heart.

Maybe I learnt to swim in a pool in the boiling heat of Amman when I was three. Or maybe it was in Cairo a year later.

She remembers Cairo.

The smile of the Sphinx. The pyramids. Riding out to the tangerine groves. White cotton sheets hanging on a line in a breeze. The heavy smoothness of ripe mangoes picked straight from the tree. Boys with tousled hair weaving between the honking cars in the street selling sweet-smelling garlands of jasmine buds.

But what she remembers on a visceral loop is swimming.

Diving and splashing in the huge pool at Cairo’s Gezira Club

Racing underwater to bursting point between silent looming legs

again and again and again

She sees towels laid out on concrete in the sun, waiters serving parents at little tables, small boys with skinny legs running and bomb-jumping with mighty shrieks and splashes.

And did she really once hail a taxi by herself and tell the driver to take her to the Gezira Club?

By her fifth birthday in Cairo she was a little fish.

From there her memory bypasses the two years at day-school in London and jumps straight to Khartoum.

I am swimming in the Blue Nile in Khartoum. The water is murky. At least I think it must have been murky because in the memory I can’t see under it.  I can’t see the crocodile that is coming to bite my leg.

The shock of the unexpected bite clamping my leg is a moment of terrified hysteria.

Only it wasn’t a crocodile. It was one of my brothers. Which one? It could have been either of them. Maybe both of them took a bite out of my leg, after circling silently underwater before coming in for the kill. It terrified me. But it also thrilled me. Is this true? Was I thrilled? Yes. Because it meant they were playing with me. Kind of.

But the fear of crocodiles was real. There were crocodiles in the Blue Nile in Khartoum. We saw them. We must have seen them from a boat — surely not while we were swimming? But I remember the choice: we could either catch bilharzia in the White Nile or risk being eaten by a crocodile in the Blue Nile. Bilharzia. I loved knowing the word. It was grown up and specialist. Catching bilharzia in the dirtier White Nile was more likely, so there wasn’t really a choice. Rather than die a slow certain death riddled with parasitic worms, we always opted for the less likely bite of the crocodile.

We? Now I have a question. Mum? Dad? If was actually risky, why did we do it? Was the crocodile factor just to ramp up the sense of excitement? Was it just part of my mother’s risk-taking disposition, which she had all her life, sometimes to the point of wrecking family outings and often to the point of scaring me to death by standing close to the edge of cliffs. (Even today, cliff-side walking or a child riding a bicycle on a canal tow path triggers a panicky tingling in her calves.)

Or is it just me and my memory that has added a layer of pith-helmet adventure to the Blue Nile swimming scenes? Years later, when I was a travel journalist, I read about doughty Victorian explorers, such as Sir Richard Burton and his competitive quest to find the source of the Nile; I saw myself toughly hacking my way through jungle or scarring my feet across the burning sands of the desert.

She wrote a story at school about crocodiles. She still has the exercise book. The story is told from the human victim’s point of view (what isn’t explained is how the human is still sentient and can breathe under water). In the story, the father crocodile is reading the newspaper in the corner of the crocodiles’ lair. They are waiting for the human to rot and become soft before they can eat it. The reason being that crocodiles can’t chew. So something was learnt from those Blue Nile swimming expeditions.

Maybe we swam in the Blue Nile simply because we didn’t have our own pool in Khartoum. I know this because of my birthday party which was held at the ambassador’s pool.

Here we go again …

Another ossified memory fuck-up!

It’s only now in writing it down that the incontrovertible flaw strikes a hammer blow to this set-in-stone memory of my brothers and two of their friends playing tennis rackets pretending to be The Beatles — she loves you yeah yeah yeah. In the shade beside the ambassador’s pool. To an invited audience of school-holiday children. At my birthday party.

School is creeping in here …. the dismal Birthday Dining Room …  cold autumnal weather …  Cruel Matron overseeing the cutting of the cake … eight girls waiting for their slice.

She never had a birthday in Khartoum!  From her eighth birthday onwards, they were always at school. So what is this strong, happy (but tainted by earache) Khartoum birthday memory all about? And is it strong, actually? It doesn’t trigger any deep somatic tremors. It’s too curated. Too coherent. It’s a memory that has just become an anecdote.  

The party was definitely my party. Wasn’t it?  I was the guest of honour. I was the one standing beside my dad when he whipped up the audience’s expectation before The Beatles appeared. They were lurking with tennis rackets in a room with French Windows leading out to the ambassador’s garden. Presumably my mother was in there too, poised and ready to place the stylus on the record when the moment came. I know it was The Beatles because when my father shouted: “And guess which group has flown all the way from England to play for you today?” the crowd, led by some cocky teenagers, roared back “The Rolling Stones!”

This was always the repeated punchline at later family gatherings.

At those giggling rememberings, usually involving quite a lot of whisky and wine, it was always re-established, by my brothers, that not only were they and their friends forced very very much against their will to be Paul, Ringo, John and George (the one I was in love with), but it was stupid of Mum and Dad to think The Beatles were the ones in vogue at that moment. The Rolling Stones were the band of the moment, they said. Anyone who knew anything about the musical scene knew that. But was even that true? God knows.

The other punchline, my tainted punchline, closes off the memory: after The Beatles played, they ran straight for the swimming pool, followed by their hysterical fans and everyone jumped in the water.

Except for me.

I had to go down by the steps because I had one of my earaches that day — of all days! — and I wasn’t allowed to put my head under the water. Swimming was thought to be the cause of those terrible earaches. Later, in a hospital in England, the cure was having my tonsils removed.

In Bahrain, we had our own pool. The pool into which the oleander trees dipped and shed their petals. It was actually an old water tank, not a proper pool. The gardeners filled it using a hosepipe.

I am in the pool. A school-holiday boy is in the pool with me. He is wrapping me up with the hose pipe. We are alone. No adults are present. In my memory the water is clean and sparkling, shot through with sunlight.

I remember the panic of being pulled underwater by the boy.

He is wrapping the hose round my squirming body.

I remember fighting my way to reach the surface and breath again.

But in my body there is the slightly sexualised excitement of it.

I knew this was something he wouldn’t have done with a boy, not in the same way. I was somehow being subjugated and I was somehow enjoying it. The princess in distress. 

In Bahrain her swimming reached its zenith. It had become competitive. There were competitions. She still has a silver plate trophy cup engraved with her name and the date, 1968.

She loved competitive swimming at school too. So does Maudie. Swimming is their power. Their superiority to Cruel Matron.

Swimming is confusing. It disrupts the severance between home and school. The same silence underwater. The same victorious roar above. The cold grey grit under my toes at the edge of the school pool. The warm grass of home. Distinct. Yet contiguous, eliding.