Pool Read Free

allowed himself to be carried softly down the incline.
    It took about two minutes to cover the fifty metres to the pool’s low end. The padded edging brought him to a gentle stop. He opened his eyes and dropped his feet to the smooth painted concrete below him.
    ‘Good boy, Campbell,’ the blind girl said.
    Wolfgang’s heart lurched. She was barely three metres away, standing partway down the wheelchair ramp with her dog in its leather harness. She wore bathers, a blue one-piece with a sewn-in nylon skirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem as overweight in her bathers as she did fully-dressed. Rather than fat, she looked rounded. Womanly. Wolfgang held his breath and backed slowly away from her across the pool. The opportunity to reveal himself had passed. He should have said something immediately, now it was too late. The dog, Campbell, watched him with what seemed to be a frown rumpling the loose skin between its eyes.
    ‘Okay,’ the girl said, feeling along the water’s edge with her toes. Her thighs and forearms were prickled with goose bumps even though it wasn’t cold. ‘Okay,’ she repeated, and released Campbell’s lead.
    Stooping, her arms outstretched, the girl shuffled down the ramp into the pool. When the water came up past her knees, she bent right forward and plunged her face beneath its glass-clear surface. For two, three, four seconds, she held her face under. Her long red hair floated around her head like a halo. Wolfgang found himself holding his breath as she must have been doing, and hoping, despite his scepticism, that it would work – that the pool would cure her. Five, six, seven, eight seconds passed. Campbell, behind her on the ramp, began whining. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty seconds (Wolfgang had stopped counting) the blind girl lurched upright. Blinking and gasping, pushing the dark ropes of hair off her face, she turned and looked straight at Wolfgang.
    He nearly gave himself away then, nearly asked was she cured? could she see? but the girl spoke first.
    ‘Shit!’ she said.
    Wolfgang’s heart raced with a warring mix of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that he hadn’t been witness to a miracle, relief that she couldn’t see him. And he was surprised, for no logical reason, that a blind person would swear.
    She swore again, though more softly this time, and with the air of someone who was beyond disappointment. Then she turned and shuffled back up the ramp to her dog.
    Wolfgang breast-stroked slowly, his head above the water, all the way to the high end of the pool. It was hard work, the slope was against him, but he was a strong swimmer. He was breathing heavily nonetheless when he climbed the four-runged ladder. Shaking the excess water off himself, he used his T-shirt to dry his hair. His shorts were dripping wet. For a moment he considered going into the men’s changing sheds, then shrugged, removed his shorts and wrung them out on the grass at the end of the pool. Nobody was there to see him – nobody who could see, anyway, Wolfgang thought as he pulled his shorts back on.
    Thirty metres away, near the fence, the blind girl had already slipped her dress on over her wet bathers and was scrabbling about on her hands and knees for her shoes. Her movements seemed clumsy, hurried. Were those tears Wolfgang saw on her cheeks, or was it simply the run-off from her wet hair? Her mouth was small and pinched as she tied her shoelaces. Stuffing her towel into her backpack, she took hold of Campbell’s harness and made her way quickly to the entrance.
    It was only after she had gone that Wolfgang saw the raffia hat lying on the grass beneath the tree. Pulling his sneakers on, he ran to get it and hurried out through the gate, but already the girl and her dog were on the other side of the road, halfway to Acacia Street. He looked down at himself – no shirt, wet shorts, laces undone – shrugged, put the hat on his own damp