Here are two extracts from my latest book, Going Under, a memoir of family secrets, addiction and escape.
These are swimming stories about my local outdoor pool Orange Aquatic Centre. Hope you enjoy these two bits of writing!
Autumn Swims In Orange
The start of March means summer is over and autumn begins. Here in Orange the leaves curl to russet and flame, but the weather is still warm and getting to the pool early for a swim is not a hardship. The outdoor 50-metre pool is a regional Australian classic, with sloping lawns on one side, a small stadium on the other and a diving pool at the end with a tall diving tower.
Early in the month I arrive in the dark, wearing my hoodie towel and favourite blue and green stripy swimming costume. Steam glows pale as it lifts off the pool water, wafting up into the blue-black sky.
I join two other swimmers in the slow lane, using my fins to help push me through the water, slow steady kicks and long pulls, slow rolls from side to side as I ease myself into the rhythm of a pool swim. So different from swimming in the sea where there is always water movement, where there is vastness all around you. This pool is a mere puddle by comparison but it has to do. Really, it’s already done its job perhaps; I did not drink anything last night because I planned this early start.
As dawn starts to paint the sky in cloudy streaks of pink and orange, the diving tower glows and the row of poplars behind turn golden green. I am here for an hour this morning, counting off my laps in groups of ten, changing strokes and taking off and putting on my fins to keep boredom at bay.
‘Too far from the sea,’ I repeat to myself in time to a lap of breaststroke.
‘Take me back to the ocean,’ I chant on the return lap of freestyle. The ocean holds us while we swim, while it shifts and slowly turns, tuned to the moon.
At Manly in Sydney I love to swim over the rocks, moving with the water in time to the sweeping tendrils of seaweed, the shifting fish, all of us moving in the back and forth of the waves, back and forth. I love to swim in Sydney’s rock pools when waves break over the side, whooshing us swimmers along with them, across the pool, diving under breaking waves into a foaming whiteness, the water light and bright.
Here in the pool, I move through the water but it does not carry me along as the ocean does. I simply stitch my way up and down, up and down. It’s wet, it’s a swim, but it’s not a real swim.
Near to the end of my hour in the pool on this early autumn morning, a rain cloud comes by, showering the pool even though there are sunbeams darting down too. It’s a remarkably Scottish combination of sunshine and rain and I am thrilled to be in it. There’s no ocean movement in the pool but water is falling down to meet me instead.
My time is nearly up but this is too beautiful to leave. I swim in the rain, watching raindrop shadows bloom in concentric circles on the bottom of the pool, overlapping into fields of shifting flowers, a Marimekko print spread out like a watery carpet.
NOVEMBER SWIM AT ORANGE OUTDOOR POOL
It’s a week into November and I pull into the car park at the pool around 10.30 am. It’s a warm, still day, the end of spring is close and there’s a tinge of ferocity in its warmth; it feels like summer is coming early. The sky is a crisp arctic blue high, high above. Some foamy white clouds waft along slowly, low on the horizon.
An early start to the day means that some writing work has already been done. The twins went off to school with all their necessities: books, lunch, sports bags. Mid-morning at the pool is usually quiet and when I pay and walk out the back, I see there are several free lanes. A lane of one’s own: it’s something Sydney pool swimmers can only dream of.
I pull my hoodie towel over my head, then sit down at the end of the lane, slide on my fins, my cap and my goggles. I slip in, breathe deep and push off from the end of the lane, dolphin kick as the water draws me in, arms straight, head down, eyes closed. I slowly kick and wish that I would never have to lift my head out of the water ever again.
Why am I feeling so jittery this morning?
Yes, why are you, Seana? There is actually nothing wrong. I feel so much pressure. My insides feel all wobbly.
But everything is going fine. The work has started well today, the kids are happy.
It’s the alcohol, isn’t it? Drinking too much these days. But it still doesn’t feel like enough.
What happened to the idea of never drinking during the week, Seana?
Oh, that went west sometime in October. And I don’t even know why.
Stop thinking, just swim.
Two hundred metres of front crawl, I’m trying to warm up but keep moving faster and faster, longing to hear my heart thumping so my thoughts are drowned out in the puffing and panting. A rest and a deep drink from my water bottle and then I start to swim again, taking long, slow pulls through the water, enjoying watching the ripples on the bottom.
I swim slow breaststroke, loving the views of the vivid green poplar trees reaching for the morning blue of the sky. I swim backstroke and see a plane flying overhead. I wonder where that plane is going and who is flying away on it. I wish I was up there on that plane, too. I put my fins back on and lift my kickboard, turn onto my back and stretch my arms then my board over my head so that I am one long straight line in the water, my legs moving up and down, core and arms taut, head back so that I look up at the sky and the dazzling sun. All that air above me, oxygen, life-giving; the water below me, carrying me, supporting me. I am between the two, made of water and in the water, lungs full of air, blood full of oxygen, of both and neither; and I’m crying.
Slowly, slowly, I move up and down in the lane. Tears slipping out, turmoil roiling in my head and washing all through my limbs. I know that exercise helps both body and mind. I want to be healthy, I really do. I don’t want to feel on edge all the time. I want my body to work well and to carry me into old age. I need to be active in old age, partly for myself but also for my children. There’s the love for them, yes, and there’s also the responsibility that comes from choosing to have children in my forties. They will need me into my sixties and seventies and, God willing, into my eighties. I want to be there for them, it’s the right thing to do.
I clasp the kickboard to my chest with one hand, kick along with my other hand trailing, fingers tapping on the lane ropes; red, white, blue, yellow, white, primary colours within the pale blue water, the Oxford-blue stripe of the pool lane below me.
Then I swim front crawl again, slow rhythmic pulls through the water of the outdoor swimming pool. This act of doing what is best for body and brain does calm my seething thoughts. That one hour in the pool, among the trees and the sloping grass, with the sun overhead and the soothing warm water. By the end of an hour, the shakes have gone and the tears too. I am hungry. I think about trying to carve out an hour a day for swimming.
Then you’d only have the other twenty-three hours a day to get through, Seana.
