The Swimmers by Chloe Lane

Author:Chloe Lane [Lane, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2023-02-08T18:02:32+00:00

With my satchel on one shoulder, I held the painting out in front of me, its face pitched to the sky. The colours were different in the natural morning light—more muted, humble. The distance across the paddock was shorter and less worrying in that light too. I walked briskly. A few birds were up and making a racket in the mānuka trees, otherwise, all I could hear was the sound of my own breathing and the damp slippery sound of my shoes on the dew-heavy grass. Not once did I stop and turn and take a step back towards Craig’s place, or ask myself what I was doing. I felt dead calm. Like that deep, dark lake again: where things, eels, probably, but also unnameable invisible things,brush against your legs while you’re swimming. And when you’re treading water, just trying to keep your head above the surface.

I was almost at the house when I saw Uncle Cliff.

He was sitting on his horse and staring away from me, towards the eastern horizon and the rising sun. The image was like something out of an old western with a backdrop of that gentle sunrise—growing from a pale kōwhai to peach to a thin wet blue. As I approached, I thought about how someone could find Uncle Cliff handsome—so straight in his saddle, his frame small but taut and strong, his face warm and open as he wriggled around to greet me.

‘You’re up early,’ he said. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

I let the painting drop to my side, as I used my other hand to shade my eyes against the glare of the sun.

‘Just a painting,’ I said. ‘A gift.’

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see it.’

I turned the painting towards him. His expression darkened over and he nervously fingered his spectacles, which were still hanging on their fluorescent-yellow cord.

‘I recognise that,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ I said. My stomach cartwheeled.

He sighed the deep worried sigh of someone who could clearly see the shit about to hit the fan in a spectacular fashion.

‘And I don’t believe,’ he said, ‘that the man who owned it would give anyone anything for free.’

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