Wedding Puzzle by Sallie Muirden

Author:Sallie Muirden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925760248
Publisher: Transit Lounge

CHAPTER

TWELVE

The days passed without a word from him. It was looking bleak. I daren’t ring if it was going to be goodbye.

I’d worked out what I was going to say pathetically in my own defence if given half a chance. When Jordan finally telephoned on Friday, he got in first.

‘I’m glad you weren’t one of the baton-change girls, Beth,’ he told me gallantly. ‘It wouldn’t have gelled between us if we’d known each other at school. I was really up myself, and you hung around with dags. Oh, I know you weren’t a dag, but you can forgive me for imagining you that way.’

He must have been rehearsing his lines beforehand. ‘You think I want a runner girlfriend, but you’re wrong. I like you for being a tumble-turner. That’s something I can’t do myself.’

So Jordan was familiar with our old school jargon, was he? The resuscitation of the tumble-turners! It was even more of a joke because a lazy pool swim once a week was the best I could manage these days.

He told me proudly that he couldn’t swim to save himself.

‘Seriously?’

A frank confession followed. As a four-year-old he’d nearly drowned in a backyard pool. After this he’d developed a water phobia; he’d refused to take swimming lessons. Since then he had learned to splash around in pools and to catch baby waves in the sea, but he couldn’t go out of his depth. He had never learned to swim properly. He didn’t even want to.

Jordan wasn’t ashamed of his incapacity, but he didn’t let on about it to many people. Tracy certainly knew, for she hadn’t been able to get him into a wetsuit on Sorrento back beach. Jordan admitted that he had always protected himself by fibbing, ‘I don’t like cold water.’ Or, ‘I’m allergic to chlorine.’

‘But you can dog paddle, can’t you? You could tread water to save yourself?’

Jordan hesitated. ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’

‘Why don’t I teach you then, Jordie?’

He accepted keenly. But of course many people had tried to rid him of his phobia before.

His self-denigrating confession two months ago was strategic. I can see that now. To allay any suggestion that I had humiliated myself by putting my old school frock on, Jordan shared something embarrassing about himself. And there were more peace offerings to come.

‘Let’s go somewhere special on Sunday,’ he suggested as our phone call drew to a close. ‘What’s the most beautiful place you know within driving distance?’

You can guess where this invitation was heading. Tracy’s letter revealed a dimmer narrative at work behind his romantic posturing. Today’s wedding sentence was waiting just around the corner.

I had been sitting on the hard boards of the Portsea pier for more than twenty minutes and my bum was getting sore, so I clambered up and wandered back the way I’d come. Down the shallow end the scouts were crowding around a teenage boy who had found something of interest in the water. It was possibly just a shell. An instructor penetrated the circle.

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