Dry Spell

by Diane Dowejko

By University Writing Group

1

The CCTV cameras must have seen something. For all I know they might have been watching the whole time and seen the whole horrible thing. The day you broke my heart. I thought they must have seen part of it at least, because two days afterwards I received two e-mails and one letter through the post. The letter surprised me the most. It was a brochure from the International Health Services. It explained in curt turns how I could cope with grief and loss. "Change," it read, "can be a positive thing." The e-mails, on the other hand, were from online dating agencies, encouraging me to join by offering the first six weeks of membership free if I didn't 'meet my match'. I threw the letter away, but later on that day I took four photos of myself for the dating-agencies. Looking back through the pictures after I had taken them, I finally had to face myself: blotchy, double-chinned and bleary-eyed. Swollen and tear-stained. I hadn't bothered to put any make-up on. Then, because I felt that I hadn't cried enough yet, I looked through the rest of the photos, the ones from when we were together.

******************************************************************

The mechanical operators are not supposed to allow the cameras to zoom into people's houses - there was legislation against that now to ease the liberals - but it happened all the time anyway. My dad had told me that. People like you and I hadn't got used to the idea yet of leaving the curtains closed or investing in thick netting to put over the windows. We didn't even bother to lower our heads as we spoke. I guess on that occasion it wasn't something that either of us was thinking about. They must have seen the whole thing; you standing there while I screamed and pleaded and tugged at my skirt and threw cushions from your IKEA-wonder of a sofa. The ripping-up of various photos that had lived on the fridge for months. The double-locking of the door when you eventually got me to leave your house, so that I couldn't get back in again even though I still had a key. The walk I had to take back to my flat, when I felt as though I couldn't walk at all and was hunched over with my arms around my waist, squeezing it as hard as I could as though I could just squeeze all of the pain right out of myself. The noise around me on the street was unbearable. Cameras were humming constantly, ten times louder than the bees used to, and the mechanical billboards were shouting out to the people who passed by them, constantly pressurising unwilling customers. There were babies crying everywhere, it seemed. I knew that the noise had always been there but I could hear every nuance of it now. 'Why now?!' I thought.

When I got home I hadn't stopped crying yet. I felt dizzy and weak. The hunger in my stomach exemplified my mood and the thought of eating made me feel sick. I needed tea, with sugar, but I couldn't have it because I had forgotten to top-up my fresh-water card. I blamed you. It was your fault. I had been staying at your house for the last six weeks straight - why did I need to top-up my fresh water when I paid for yours? For ours. It was yours again now. Maybe that was why you dumped me the way you did. Without emotion, in a monotone voice you saved for when you were really fed-up. You didn't move any part of your body for half-an-hour. Maybe it was because I did too much for you and secretly you hated that. Maybe it was because I had been staying at yours all that time and hadn't given you any space. Maybe that was why you had come home late from the pub every night for the last week. Because, because. Maybe, maybe.

2

Only in retrospect does the truth become apparent. And I realise now that the way I was feeling was so stupid, really. At that time, I felt as though I was the first and only person to ever feel that much pain; something so unjust and unexpected (as though my heart had been kicked clear of my ribcage, in one clean sweep, by a professional rugby player) and utterly pointless; while at the same time I knew so well that it was nothing new to feel - that hundreds and thousands and just maybe even millions of people had been through what I was going through right then, the utter humiliating devastation of you leaving me and not really knowing why. It really didn't make me feel better in any way, thinking those things.

Every morning after that day, I woke up forgetting that I was in my own bed and you were not there. One morning I went head-first into the wall as I got out of my bed on the wrong side. That gut-wrenching, sinking feeling passed in after about a week. It was the littler things that lasted. How you held onto my hips when we were in bed together and the way that you had rolled my cigarettes so much more elegantly and masterfully than I ever did, even though you had always hated the fact that I smoked at all. Maybe that was why it didn't work.

On the nights that I most craved sleep, I lay awake for hours. One night I remembered your smell; heavy with spice and fresh water and soap. I rolled over onto my side and picked up the book on my bedside table. I cracked the spine and flicked through it until I stopped on a random page. I pulled the book up to my face, burying my nose deep in its middle, and I breathed in deeply. The pages of the book were new; they smelt fresh, salty and wooden. I did it again, flipping through to a page half-way towards the end from the last, and sniffed again. I sighed deeply and repeated it again - I turned to another page. And another. I slept that night.

3

I arranged a pact with myself. I told myself not to think about you. I felt sure that if I made myself promise not to think about you, I would forget. Blissful amnesia. I would keep busy doing all of those things that I had been meaning to do for ages; the things I had never quite got round to doing, like the piles of ironing gathering dust next to my equally dusty bookcase. I thought about reading the books that I had bought before I had met you, which I had never read because we were always doing something better than reading.

When I broke my knee a few days later, I discovered that doing certain things really was more exciting than reading or ironing, most especially when I knew for a fact that I couldn't do them anymore. I broke my knee by falling off the pavement and into the road, landing on my left. I was walking home from the pub alone, full of gin and thinking of you. The next morning my leg was encased in a full, blue fibreglass plaster that smelt of fresh paint for the first few hours. Now I had days, weeks, just less than two months to think and to iron. In-between thinking and ironing and reading, I found a lot of time in those seven weeks to eat. I cooked my way through boredom. Not anything like the food that you and I used to eat; fresh salmon from Scotland and ripe steaks from the local butchers. Now I ate cheap mince chillies and chicken in cream. I couldn't afford fish anymore. Once I was able to venture outside of the house on my crutches, I discovered that the corner shop had an ice-cream fridge near their front door - something which had seemingly alluded me before.

I cried sometimes, during the long days, because I wanted you to be with me so desperately. To do anything, it didn't seem to matter what it was you would have been doing, just seeing your face would have done. Once I finally understood the implications, and because I felt like getting angry at you at that point, I knew that if that had in fact happened, it would have only been because you felt sorry for me. I used to call it kindness but I had since reasserted your gratuitousness as pity. So I never did make that phone-call to you. I didn't even know if you were around anymore.

The doctor who removed the cast from my leg seven weeks later recommended swimming as the best form of physical recovery. And weight-loss. She then warned me that swimming might set me back financially. Private swimming-bath memberships were expensive and the public pools were substantially over-chlorinated; compensating for the lack of fresh water. They might bring my eczema out again. That's what really got to me about the International Health Service doctors - they had a skill for being able bring someone's hopes up and suddenly smack them back down to earth all in the same utterance. However - when the doctor told me all about this - that was when I thought of you again, and that day a few weeks ago that seemed like ten lives ago.

Two weeks after you had asked me to leave, I came to collect all my things from your flat. It must have not shown on my face at the time, but by the end of that last afternoon I just couldn't bare to empty the last of my belongings into that lonely, longing, recyclable shopping bag. You had packed it for me. I didn't look at you while you did it and I didn't cry at all. I don't even remember talking to you, but I must have done when you offered to give me a hand. Or maybe you just saw it on my face.

The first time I had gone through that bag - one month after it had been packed and four weeks after I had broken my knee - I found the key. When I saw it I first felt confused. Then I felt surprised. Then I felt sad. I felt confused as to why it was in a bag of my things when it had belonged to you. I subsequently felt surprised to realise that you had probably put it in the bag on purpose. And then, then I felt sad. So, so sad. Finding that key in that bag meant that you had put it in there because you felt guilty. Giving it to me was your attempt at self-redemption. Its presence also meant that you had no intention of using it anymore - you weren't going to need it because you were finally going away; getting away. You had found a way out.

After leaving the hospital and getting a taxi home (I was still too weak to walk very far) I searched for the key and found it where I had left it that day - in a drawer, under my socks. How ridiculous! Under my socks, can you imagine? I turned it over in my hand a few times. It was the shape and size of an old credit-card - the sort that had been used before micro-chip implants became so popular and the majority of people gave up on plastic. The key-card felt smooth on my fingertips and had a black magnetic strip across the back. Your name was on the front. My heartbeat quickened as I wondered how I could possibly get access into the pool-club with your name on the key.

I relaxed again as quickly as I had panicked. There was no title on the card: not any "Mr", "Mrs" or "Sir", no mention of gender. Your name, thank god, was androgynous enough to evade speculation. I could get away with it. And I did.

4

The tarmac driveway to the swimming-club was lined with tall, thin trees on either side, equally spaced from one another. They were nearly all exactly the same height and their leaves were already plump, full and green. There was something all at once ominous and enchanting about the club building; the sun reflected off the front doors of the entrance in shimmering colours, but the foyer was cold and the air was dry inside. For the first time since... I could not remember. I had forgotten the last time I had been somewhere so completely quiet. The was no buzzing from the CCTV cameras, no whirring from their zoom. No talking posters. No screaming, thirsty children. The only sound was of a soft ticking.

Inside the foyer of the club, behind a long, curved desk stood two receptionists, dressed in navy-and-white. They smiled so brightly at me as I approached the desk that I thought they might suddenly bear sharp teeth and pounce on me. One of them, a blonde women, held out her open hand, palm-side up, as I walked towards them. I guessed what she wanted and handed her the key-card.
"I'm sorry," she said, cheerily "the swipers aren't working today; I'll just have to scan you through manually. It won't take a second."
She took the key-card from my fingers. I remained silent and I stared at her face, even though she wasn't looking at me anymore. I heard a beep from behind the desk.
"Thank you Ms, uh..." She screwed her eyes up looking at what I guessed must have been a computer screen behind the desk. "Gosh, that is an unusual name, isn't it!" she exclaimed happily.
"Yes," I replied, staring at the key-card with what must have looked like nervous panic on my face, "my father was from Europe."
"Aaah right," she smiled, "well that would explain that! Have a good afternoon."
She handed the key-card back to me. It almost occurred to me to bolt back out of the front entrance while I still had the chance. But as I heard the click of the turnstile unlocking, my feet carried me through into the main club, shyly thanking both the receptionists as I went.

Inside the club it smelt like vanilla and chlorine. The floors were laminate-wood and my feet made no more sound than a large cat's would on the smooth surface. Halfway down the corridor was a drinking fountain, with a sign above it that read: "Fresh Drinking Water is Free for Members and Staff". I reached the end of a main corridor where there were two doors to either side of me. The door to the right was marked "Ladies" ('how old-fashioned!' I thought) and I pushed through the door and into the changing rooms.

I thought about you and I wondered so many things that first time I went swimming. I wondered whether you used to get changed and dressed in a cubicle or out in the main changing rooms in front of everybody else. I questioned all sorts of silly things, like which lane you used to swim in and which pair of swim shorts you had worn. The pool was long; I remember thinking that first day that it was the biggest pool I had ever seen, that it must have been an old Olympic pool. Later I found out it was actually only half the size of that, at a still-impressive twenty-five metres. The floor of the main area was made up of slabs of rough cream stone; to stop anyone from slipping, I guessed. The border of the pool glinted with bright blue tiles.  Large milky-white windows covered the opposite wall. I could not see out of the windows but they let in bright light.

That day there were three people in the pool. One person in the fast lane, who I watched for a few minutes before realising that I was staring, entranced by the skill of how they glided up and down the lane. I got into the pool at the opposite end, near a mother who was teaching her young son how to swim breaststroke. Her accent surprised me at first - she sounded very well-to-do, very genteel. I remembered what I had read on the internet about how expensive a membership to this place was. So her accent made sense, really.

The pool's water-temperature was written up on a white-board next to the empty lifeguard station - thirty-degrees Celsius. So I didn't have to get in too slowly because there is nothing worse in a situation like that than people knowing that you are a novice and watching you expectantly. The water felt perfect, as though I was getting into a tepid bath. I made my way over to the medium-fast lane. I must have been feeling very brave to have done that, now that I look back on it. I wet my hair quickly and pushed off the wall of the pool with my feet almost immediately, as though I had done it a thousand times before. By the time I had swum, or rather trashed my way to the other side of the pool, I felt as though I might never get my breathe back in quite the same way again without my heart exploding. After a minute I managed to try again, swimming back to the point where I had started. When I got there I decided it was time for a rest-break.

I wondered then whether or not you had ever talked to anybody else in the lanes during your rest-breaks. I imagined your strong arms breaking through the surface of the cool blue water like fins as you glided. Every night after that, when I went to the pool (and it was every night of every day because I had nothing else to keep my mind occupied), I wondered and thought and imagined those things and all sorts of other things. I did that for the first six weeks. And then I just didn't any more. I don't know if it was because I was forgetting to think about you or because that pool took over everything eventually. Everything about you and me, and eventually everything about the rest of my life.

5

I couldn't hear a thing when I was under the water, not anything except the bubbles when I exhaled and the subtle, swift sweeps of my arms hitting the water and passing my sides as I rushed forwards. I wasn't just swimming, I was swimming really well. I have no concept of how long it took me to become good or fast, I just learned how to do it properly. I learnt that the most important thing to concentrate on when swimming freestyle stroke is your breathing. It doesn't matter if you inhale on every second stroke or every third stroke. It just has to be consistent, rhythmic. Most importantly, you have to finish inhaling and push your head back into the water before you next arm hits the water. Your legs - they should never stop kicking, ever, except when you reach the end of the lane and have to turn. Whether you're fast or slow, you should never stop kicking.

I smelt of chlorine day in and day out, but only on my hands. I loved it, that smell, because I knew that one day, when it wasn't there anymore, I would miss it and I dreaded that day. So I smelt my hands whenever I could. The smell was the strongest on the back of the hand and began to diminish towards the palms; by the time I reached my fingertips the smell of chlorine was only ever so faint.

I couldn't hear anything under the water. Not a thing; not the voices from the advertising boards screaming at me which mascara to buy next, or a hundred mothers on the street pushing wailing babies in cheap prams. I tell a lie: I could hear something. I could hear the sound of my own body sweeping the water. After a while, as I got better and better, faster and faster, even that noise became less noticeable and finer. That's why, when one Friday night I was alone in the pool and a voice spoke to me through the bubbles, I got such a fright that I swallowed half a litre of pool-water.

6

The first time that I heard that voice in the bubbles, I thought one thing first and another shortly afterwards. The first thing I thought was that one of the cameras was talking to me. I knew it happened sometimes, when the odd pervert who had been employed by one of the camera companies took advantage of the integrated speaker-systems to flirt with young girls and women. My dad had told me about that.

The second thing I thought, once I had realised that there were no cameras in the private swimming club, was that I had finally gone completely mad. The chlorine must have reacted with something else in the water. Everyone knew that there was something different, odd, in the water; all the water in Eurasia; to keep it cleaner. That subtle tincture of chlorine and chemicals had finally found its way to the part of my brain that knew that I was mad anyway. It had infused it, and had finally surfaced as what sounded like the voice of an old African man. The first thing he said to me was:

"Hello."
I didn't want to be rude so I said hello back and asked him why on earth he was talking to me.
"I see that you swim very well now" he said.
I thanked him and pointed out that he hadn't really answered my question.

It took him two weeks to answer my question which was unnerving for me for a while until I realised that he was in fact quite interesting to talk to. The pool remained eerily empty every evening that I went and it meant that I would not be seen being mad and could therefore continue to do so at my leisure. One night, when I was very tired and lulling along in the lane, I stuck my head under the water to talk to him, and he finally told me who he was. That's how I found out I wasn't mad.

7

"I do not have my own name. We are the njuzu and amakhosi (that is what men called us). We and our ancestors and those that will still be born are healers and spirits of the water. We are not born as you men are; we are made. I'll tell you the old story shall I? When a man or woman of flesh was called to be a diviner, they immersed themselves in water, sometimes for days. They went to a sea or a river and covered themselves with water. If they returned to the living, they would share the wisdom of the waters with the other men and women. Sometimes they did not return from within the seas or rivers. They remained within the water, taking other forms. Often we njuzu and amakhosi appeared as snakes and frogs, and dolphins in the sea-waters."

"But things began to change in the years of recent past. The waters began to first become soiled by man's wastefulness. Then the seas began to rise. As the waters rose, so many of us flourished in the seas and oceans. But on land, in the fresh waters of the rivers and lakes, we could not sustain our forms. As fewer and fewer men and women came to the waters to learn and be transformed and the people began to further poison the water in order to keep it 'clean', we began failing and our numbers diminished. We were scattered by the water-relocations, and so that is how I exist here, among the chemicals and without form but in the airy gurgles of the water. Men and women sustain me; as they swim and churn the water so I survive."

I called him Mogolo. It meant 'big brother' in his language, he told me. He told me this only because I sometimes said that he was like the brother I never had and I think he must have felt sorry for me then. I spent most of the time asking Mogolo questions, rather than telling him things. It might sound crazy, but I felt like he knew a lot about me already. His answers were always magnificently eloquent, perfectly poised and articulated. I realised now why I only heard him when I was under the water, so I spent more and more time there. His voice sang to me through the fine bubbles as I swam, one hand after the other, letting off tiny jet streams in which I could hear his smooth answers.

8

One night I told Mogolo of my plight of heartache; why I had started coming to the pool and now swam as though there was nothing else.

"Child," he said, once I had finished telling him our story, "I will tell you one hundred times of those who have suffered fates of heartache far worse than yours. Far greater and sadder and yet somehow I feel now that you know these facts already?"
I assured him that he was right but it still made me sad when he said things like that.

That is why I felt so odd when you called my phone the next day, more so than it would have felt anyway. Your name came up on the screen of my phone and I realised that I had forgotten to delete your number. Or rather, that I had forgotten that I had not deleted you number when I meant to all those angry months back. Your voice sounded the same, with just a hint of sorrowful guilt. You made a joke to ease me up and regrettably I laughed at it. Forgetting about all those things that I had meant to say to you, weeks ago when I had had all the time in the world to think about it and now I hadn't thought about it for such a long time it was as though it had never mattered in the first place. I couldn't even stay aloof enough to turn you down when you offered to take me out for a drink.

Two days later, the afternoon before I was supposed to be meeting with you for a drink, I went to the pool for the second last time. It was busy that afternoon and Mogolodid not speak to me. I wanted to think it was because he didn't feel comfortable around other people except me. After my swim, in the changing rooms, I used the hairdryers for the first time, and put my make-up on in the starkly-lit mirrors before slipping on a pair of red kitten-heels and walking out the doors to meet you.

9

I woke up the next morning because of the dull, aching pain in my right shoulder. I don't know if it was because it had been so long since I had slept on that side of my body or because I knew that you were lying in my bed, and felt all-of-a-sudden odd about that, but I got out of bed. I never thought for a moment that I would actually want you to leave but at that moment I did. Of course once you woke up and I looked straight into your eyes I thought I never wanted you to leave again but deep down I knew that you were going to anyway. You had other things now that were more important than me and it wasn't that which tortured my emotions. What had numbed me was the fact that I had something else I wanted to do other than be with you. That feeling was neither comforting nor conclusive of how I was feeling. It was all that overwhelmed me. It may have even been an excuse. Once you had gone back to sleep, I left my front-door key on the bedside table and snuck out of the flat with my rucksack.

10

That night, after I had been to the pool and got all the details from Mogolo, I headed South on foot and found the cove that he had told me about once. Now privately owned, the small beach lay just two miles from the main town. I had to climb my way over a cross-hatch fence about seven feet high and dodge six cameras in order to get to the sea. But everything was quiet. The cameras here didn't whirr. They didn't even work. Maybe somebody had decided that the money would be better spent on more eventful areas of the beach and left these cameras as dummies. It was funny but as I reached the water's edge I thought about you. I tried to work out how I felt and I thought that I would feel sad or miss you, or chicken out because maybe, just maybe, there was a chance for things to be the way they were when we had been happy. I almost tried to make myself feel those things, but I couldn't. I actually felt happy. I took all my clothes off under the glow of the moonlight - a full-moon, just like Mogolo had said it should be. The water was a lot colder than it ever had been in the pool, but the wind that blew through my hair and across the front of my face was warm and eased the initial freshness of the soft, lapping waves against my naked skin. I took one last deep breath and dived into the sea, just as I had practised one thousand times before.