The Swimming Pool by Louise Candlish

Author:Louise Candlish
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405919890
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Stoneborough, August 1985

She was Mel’s and my bête noire, though I wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce that and, in any case, the truth was that we were hers – a beast with two heads.

She came from the new estate by the woods, where we hung out sometimes on the building site of half-complete houses and where the finished articles, like hers, seemed to us millionaires’ ranches from American TV shows. In truth, that would have been enough to win our interest had she not been so pretty where we were plain, so popular where we were feared. She was also the best swimmer. The way she held herself in concentration before plunging into a dive, only to emerge seconds later with an expression of unselfconscious joy on her face, pieces of broken light spraying behind her: it both fascinated and infuriated me. The boys, usually chortling, called her the Nymph and competed over who would go out with her.

We called her Nessie, short for Loch Ness Monster.

The first time I remember seeing her at the pond she was with her mother and that in itself was something to be despised because this was a place for kids, not adults, everyone knew that.

‘She’s got no other protection,’ said Mel. Most of the kids had siblings, Mel and I each other, but Nessie’s sister was away for the summer at some watersports camp. (They were evidently an aquatic clan.)

The sole adult voice rang out repeatedly that afternoon: ‘Come out of the sun, darling’; ‘That was a better dive!’; ‘Careful out there in the middle. Your feet could get caught on roots.’

She was one of those neurotic mums who saw danger lurking everywhere, who made such a big deal about being Nessie’s mother it was as if she thought she was Nessie. (When my own mother phoned from home, I refused to speak to her.)

‘Show-off,’ Mel said loudly.

‘Slag,’ I agreed. Though neither of us looked in Nessie’s direction, everyone who knew us would guess who we meant because it was common knowledge we had it in for her.

‘Who are those girls?’ Nessie’s mother asked. ‘Are they your friends?’

‘In your dreams,’ Mel drawled, under her breath. That was one of our lines that summer: In your dreams. We never said it to each other: it was as if we understood at some elemental level that the other would not dare have dreams of her own.

‘You know what?’ Mel said. ‘We should do her some time.’ She meant ambush, strip, humiliate.

‘Who – Nessie? Seriously?’

A decorum of sorts prevailed in our dealings with the group. A boy could be stripped and insulted and left to wriggle his way home, but his hands could cover all there was to cover and he’d usually come back the next day. (In Stoneborough that summer, there was nowhere else to go.)

A girl was different. We hadn’t done a girl before.

‘Actually, forget it,’ Mel said, lighting a cigarette stolen from her father and sending smoke in Nessie’s mother’s direction, challenging her to tell us off for it.

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