The early morning sky was the pale pink of roses. Mist hovered over the water. The yellow crescent of the sun like butter on the horizon, all trace of yesterday’s rain long gone. Stella could feel damp sand squish between her toes. The tide was out, lines of flotsam left in its wake; shells, seaweed, bottle tops, sea glass. She picked up a bright blue piece as she walked, the smooth edges soft in her hand, round like a pebble, then she chucked it as far as she could throw. The cool of the morning chilled her skin, the hairs on her body tingled, the smell of the salt in the air caught her breath with memory.
She walked and walked out towards the water, perfect footprints in a line behind her, only stopping when she was calf-deep in the sea, tiny white horses lapping round her ankles. The cold pierced her skin, raw and sharp, then almost immediately dulled as she acclimatised, a pattern repeated every footstep deeper.
She tried not to think of Jack as she stared out at the horizon. She brought her hands up to her face, over her eyes. It felt almost like he’d had an affair. A double life that made everything they had done the last few months a lie. How could she have tripped through it so blasé, so unsuspecting. She wondered if this would be the death of them. Imagined packing up her things, Rosie clinging to her side. Sonny would probably choose to stay with Jack. And the gulf between them would widen. It would feel less like her place to run and hold Sonny’s head to her chest when he was about to cry. Stella took her hands from her face. She felt grey. Tired. She felt like the sand slipping away beneath her feet with the ebb and flow of the tide. She tried to grab it with her toes but still it slithered away.
She stared out at the white horizon of the sun-bleached sea. The rolling tide had brought with it the sharp memory of standing here every morning at six with her dad. Every day whatever the weather. A Tesco bag of Marmite sandwiches and a Thermos of tea on the shore. Two towels. Two dressing gowns. Standing in the surf, pulling her swimming hat on, spitting in her goggles to stop them fogging, rinsing them in sea water, adjusting them, her dad by her side doing the same. The summer sea calm and languid around their ankles, arms skating over the glassy surface, sun warm on their backs. And then the bitter menace of winter. The press of the waves, the gasp for air, the breathless dive through icy grey waves.
Standing here now she couldn’t believe she had done it. The cold of the water on this early summer morning made her want to back away. Her teenage self would mock her – say she was old and cosseted. But Stella could see no benefit to hurling herself into what was no more than a block of melted ice.
Her brain gave her a little test, tried to make her dive but her body stayed where it was.
The feeling bowled her backwards to another time she had stayed put. The British National Swimming Championships, the final selection race for the Olympic team. Another moment she had been poised ready to spring, where she had tried to will her body to dive against its will. She saw the view of the swimming pool as she stood on the blocks. The turquoise of the water, the smell of the chlorine. She could feel the nerves of the people next to her, the girls she’d raced and beaten year in, year out. She felt the nerves of her father on the side. Saw him already visualising the Olympic Stadium, the tour bus, the scoreboard, the medal podium. This was it for him – this wouldn’t be any normal coaching job. This would be reliving the Olympic dream. The glory. Reliving it through her. This would be pride born out of blood. His daughter, there in no small part because of him. She could be as good if not greater, that’s what people said. And she had been one swim away. One dive into that rippling turquoise blue. Everything they had worked for. Every morning. Every evening. Every nutritionally balanced meal. Every holiday – always Portugal because they had an Olympic-sized pool near good beaches for her mother. Every injury. Every physio. Every training camp. Every weekend.
Stella retreated out of the waves and sat down on the shore. She wrapped her arms around her knees. The sea lapped cold around her bottom.
She shut her eyes. The bright blue of the pool flickered like the sun behind her lids. She remembered the cool absence of any nerves. Nothing. No pre-race vomit, no trembling, no bone-jangling fear. Not a single scrap of adrenaline pumped through her body that day. Which meant that rather than glancing down the course and envisioning the searing pain to come, thriving off it, taut with robotic focus, blinded to the enemies in neighbouring lanes knowing that this would be hers, as it always was, she could instead have turned to the girl on the blocks next to her, head down, quivering with nerves, and gone, ‘Hey, why so serious?’
Because Stella had lost the biting, furious desire to win. It had slipped away, in retrospect, gradually during two months off to recover from a rotator cuff injury in her shoulder just before her eighteenth birthday, but at the time it felt like it happened overnight. Waking one morning and finding the impulse gone, she scrabbled around her brain trying to get it back, trying to grasp in the dark for her competitive edge. Pleading with her body to find its desperate want. But coming back empty-handed. Lying in bed trembling with the terrified sinking feeling that she would have to tell her dad. Tell him or else just pretend nothing had happened. Go through the motions, her limbs in every stroke slowed with reluctance like an anchor dragging along behind. Stand in the locker room with nothing but a bubble of nervous laughter. Climb onto the blocks and wait and see what happened.
On the beach, Stella glanced around her, checking that no one else was around to catch her sitting in the waves wearing her shorts and vest. There was nobody. Just a mile of yellow sand and ochre cliffs and seagulls stalking like sergeant majors. She turned back to the water. She swallowed. She felt the bind of so many versions of herself; Stella the daughter, Stella the swimmer, Stella Potty-Mouth, Stella the mother and the wife. And immediately she wanted to be just Stella. Stella with the weight of no disappointments, no expectations, no responsibilities, no let-downs or controls.
Suddenly she was standing. And then she was running, ungainly and splashy, through the waves. Her brain no further ahead than her body. And then she was diving. Her hands cutting the surface, her face stinging, the freezing water shivering over her like gloss. Hard and tough, painful and exquisite.
Her head throbbed from the cold. Her cheeks pink, her heart thumping. Her muscles on autopilot, carving her through the water – like they had been crying out for this for years, dusting themselves off, fizzing for joy. She swam and swam, right out through the glassy stillness of the water. And then the moment hit, as it did, as she had forgotten, every time, when the cold and the adrenaline made her fly. When she felt the majesty of every wave. When the world became as small as this stretch of sea. When her body burnt from cold and her skin stung from salt and her muscles screamed and her heart thumped and she felt a rush course through her like bubbles in champagne.
She swam and she swam. She thought of nothing. She thought of everything. She saw the look on her dad’s face after she hadn’t dived in at the start of that race – the flash of worry that something was wrong then the shock and the barely restrained fury. The image of him edging quickly between the plastic seats, trying to get to the selection committee, his hand movements as he protested, the officials coming to talk to Stella. The silent shake of her head. The astonished, nervous faces when the shout of her father’s curse echoed round the pool. She heard her mother’s sigh of disappointment, her look of what a waste of time. She saw herself slamming the door of her crappy Fiat Uno car packed for university, a last-minute place through clearing, standing on the drive with her father inside the house refusing to say goodbye and her mother telling her softly that it was better if she just went, that she didn’t want to make a scene, did she?
Stella swam until she thought her lungs might pop. Then she rolled over slick like a seal, gasping for air, lying on her back, floating with her arms outstretched staring up at the sky, blue and pink like a bag of penny sweets.
She closed her eyes and let herself sink, the water closing over her, hair swirling in tentacles. She remembered when her and her dad would sit, wrapped in their towels, drinking their tea, eating their sandwiches, staring out to sea in silence, gulls drifting in the sky above. A moment of being completely alone but together. The world retreating. And her dad would look at her and say, ‘Best part of the day.’ And they would grin, high, like they held the secret of life while others simply strolled on by.
She wondered where that feeling had gone. All that love. And why, when it went, did it all have to go. She lay submerged. Why couldn’t she have kept this bit – this swimming, this sea, this calm, this elixir. Why couldn’t they have saved this?
It made her think of Jack. The man she had married not just because of his stability and his being proper. But for his evenness. His rationality. His calm whatever the storm. That, unlike her father, he would never in the heat of emotion say, ‘I am so ashamed of you I can’t look at you.’ She hadn’t married him as an antidote to her dad, she had married him because he had shown her way of living different to the one she had known. A balance, a partnership, an equality.
‘Hello there? Everything OK? Need a hand?’ Stella was snapped spluttering back to reality by a booming voice on the shore.
She looked around disorientated, treading water and shielding her eyes from the sun to see a tall white-haired man standing on the shoreline in yellow baggy trousers and a black T-shirt, two dogs were sniffing about in the sand and next to him was a woman who looked remarkably like her mother.
‘Fine!’ she shouted back. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded.
‘Oh, it’s Stella!’ she heard the surprise in her mother’s voice and got the impression that she and her mum were wanting the same thing – that they should just continue on their dog walk and Stella stay where she was. But the man – Stella presumed he must be Mitch the hippy – did not appear to be for moving. He just stood watching with an annoying-looking smile on his face. Like the sight of her swimming was abundantly pleasing to him.
Stella did not want to be watched. And since he didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she had no choice but to swim back in. The distance suddenly quite long and exhausting, the joy lost with this stranger and her mother standing watch.
When she finally got shallow enough she walked the rest of the way out of the water, the pull of the almost non-existent waves against her legs. Self-conscious of the fact she was in her shorts and vest with no towel, the spontaneity of her moment beamed embarrassingly off her.
‘Stella, you’re in your clothes.’ Her mother frowned.
‘Yes, I know.’
Mitch was still smiling. The dogs were off chasing a ball he’d thrown. ‘Apologies if we ruined your swim, but it’s early and I just wanted to make sure you weren’t in trouble.’
‘It’s fine,’ Stella said, pulling at her wet clothes. The fabric clung like suction cups.
‘Stella, this is Mitch,’ her mother said, her cheeks marked with the smattering of a blush.
Stella squeezed her wet hair. ‘Hello,’ she said, a little wary. This was the guy who had her mother going to book club, divorcing her father, and wearing embroidered jeans.
Mitch thrust out a hand, big silver rings on two of his fingers, leather straps round his wrist and a tattoo of Buddha on his forearm.
Stella inwardly rolled her eyes.
‘Your mother and I walk our dogs together,’ he said, just as a scruffy mongrel dropped a saliva-covered ball at his feet and next to it Frank Sinatra panted for it to be thrown again.
Stella wanted to ask if they were having an affair.
‘Do you not have a towel, Stella?’ Her mother frowned, looking around on the beach for where Stella had left her things.
‘No, but I’m fine.’ Stella waved away the concern in her voice.
‘You’ll catch a chill,’ her mother pushed.
‘Moira,’ Mitch cut in, giving her mother a look. ‘Stella is perfectly capable of looking after herself, remember.’
Her mother inhaled, a deep breath through her nose. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I suppose she is.’
Stella couldn’t help the slight upturn of her mouth or the bemused expression on her face as she looked between the pair of them. No one ever said anything like that to her mother, not without getting a shocked harrumph in reply.
The dogs came bounding back. Mitch hurled the ball miles down the beach. ‘No word from Graham today?’ he asked, as if enquiring whether the postman had been.
Stella shook her head. ‘Not that I know of.’
Moira said, ‘No.’
Mitch nodded. ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up soon.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Stella half-laughed, almost warming to this character. ‘Then we can all go back to normal.’ She said it before thinking. Her mother walked away a few paces, picking up a pebble from the shoreline then tossing it into the sea.
Mitch was watching Stella watching Moira. An annoying half-smile on his face. ‘You’ll never get back to normal, Stella,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing.’ The dogs were back, nudging around his ankles, keen to move on. Mitch threw the ball, it landed with a smack in the frothing water and the dogs splashed full tilt into the surf.
Stella didn’t reply.
His expression was smug in its knowingness. ‘As I’ve said to Moira, if it’s ever normal again no one’s saying what they really feel. You’re all politely lying.’
Stella was about to scoff at this guru-ish psychobabble, but then she was reminded of Jack’s earlier confession and the polite lies of their marriage.
Her mother threw the ball this time. Underarm, high up in the sky, the dogs hovering in anticipation. Stella watched as Mitch briefly touched her on the small of her back. ‘Shall we carry on?’ he asked. Her mother turned and nodded. Stella felt a bit ill watching the gentle intimacy of their movements. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her dad touch her mum.
‘There are fresh beach towels in the airing cupboard, Stella.’
‘Moira!’ Mitch warned, jokey but firm.
‘Yes, yes, I know. She can look after herself.’ Her mother shook her head. ‘OK, I’ll see you later, darling,’ she said, giving Stella a quick peck on the cheek.
‘Lovely to meet you, Stella,’ Mitch said, shaking her hand again, rings clacking. Just before he turned to go, he added, ‘Remember, never wish for normal,’ with a confident, cocky wink.