Pool boy

This is one of the very few humorous stories I've tried writing in my time. Usually I go for existentially depressing, but I'd been reading a lot of Nick Earls at the time and you'll definitely find his style of humour channelled here if you've read anything by him.

This is another story from 2018. My apologies to the engineers I now know - you are portrayed very unfairly here. Back then, stereotypes were all I had to go off. But the stereotypes make it funnier, so I've left them in here. I promise I value you all dearly now.

Enjoy!

Pool boy

And this summer is killing me. I think I’ll be eighty-five before uni starts again. Wet and toothless and saggy in all the worst places. This is what it feels like, anyway.

The ceiling fan cuts through the mid-afternoon January air like a knife through room-temperature butter. The cabana is like an oven. I have to be careful not to touch the parts of the wall in the sun or I’ll end up in the burns unit at the hospital. A cup of warm water sits beside the cash register, untouched. I’m sweating it out faster than I can drink it.

My co-worker, Lauren, trudges back in through the gates wiping at the sides of her mouth. She wanders into the cabana to grab a cold drink from the fridge, dropping a few coins by the cash register, and heads back out to the front desk. Somehow she still manages to stink of cigarettes even though I know her durry-breaks are really spent with her boyfriend in the disabled toilets. And I wonder with what magic she manages to do it. Maintain the stink, the story. If, mid-thrust, she’s got a cigarette lit, taking unhurried drags as poor Pete goes at it like a rabbit in breeding season. Pete with his prematurely-sagging balls swinging like Newtown’s cradle, saying hey, babe, I’m not hurting you right? And Lauren, ever so casually, a cigarette dangling from one side of her mouth, giving him a toothless smile that says please, Pete. Don’t oversell yourself.

The thought of Lauren and Pete sharing fluids in the disabled toilets is enough to bring up my home-packed lunch (cheers, mum), so I focus my eyes on the pool. And these are just faceless bodies sliding through the water, up and down, going nowhere and knowing it. Passing time and calories after work. These bodies are safe. There are no crevices touching and certainly no unwarranted fluids.

I look up as someone arrives at the cabana. And she’s there, saying nothing, two-dollars-fifty in her hand. Wet hair dripping down her back. Water beading along her shoulders, chest still rising with the energy of it all.

‘Just a Cyclone, thanks,’ she says, and I think too many hours in this cabana during the peak of summer have managed to fry my brain, because I’m staring at the two-dollars-fifty in my hand and I can’t quite comprehend she’s here. I drop it into the till, moving slowly, dumbly, to the freezer, taking it out and passing it over to her without a sound. She smiles at me, wet eyelashes hugging eyes as blue as the sky. And I want to say something. Anything, literally anything, but then she’s turned away and it’s just her back. Her back and her legs, walking, hips moving, and doing it in a kind of way that I think is designed to make it impossible to concentrate at all. My hand is burning against the cash register but the pain hasn’t made its way through yet.

She doesn’t stay. I hope she will, but she doesn’t. She begins work on the popsicle as she strolls out the gates, towel hanging around her waist, hips still moving. And my hand is still burning, the skin still screaming out you absolute moron, there are nerve cells for a reason, and sometimes I think really I’m just pathetic.

The rest of the day passes as slowly and uneventfully as it started. People buy ice blocks and cans of soft drink and sweat it out on the plastic deck chairs, and mothers chat over Magnums as their children fling themselves madly around the non-slip sitting area. The mid-summer afternoon sun as bright and bleaching as a fire, rolling off the tin roof of the cabana, soaking me in painful, unbearable heat. Sweat dribbles down the sides of my face. I take a swig of the warm cup of water beside the cash register.

People filter out as the sun sets, and Bob, my manager, lets me take a Milo ice cream cup for all my hard work today. Not that this has been hard work. But I take it anyway, eating slowly and solemnly as I walk back home with the girl on my mind.

And I should probably explain the precedent. The precedent as to why she’s so important. As raging as my hormones are no one can get that hung up on a girl they’ve never met.

I'm fairly sure I met her at a party once, when we were still in high school. Or met is a strong word. She asked if I had a smoke and we shared a cigarette on the back steps for five minutes before her friend started throwing up in a bush. I can't remember her name. Just these pieces of her face, of her eyes and the blue in them and the way she let the smoke out her mouth.

I think of her as I take the path out to the bus stop. Moving without needing to think where I’m going. As if I am in a trance, my mind singing lines along the arches of her neck and shoulders, tracing eyes I finally know the colour of. I sit on a bus with only two other people and I picture her, turning away, with a smile I can hold only for a second and the smoke pooling from her lips. I carry this with my all the way home, wondering if there’ll be an end to it, this thinking. Wishful, painful thinking.

I lie on my bed and I watch the ceiling. I hope I see her tomorrow.

...

I don’t see her tomorrow, or the day after. A day turns into two into a week, and it’s even worse, now I have something to look forward to. It’s as if my life has been divided into two, equally bleak sections: days when I’m waiting to see her, and the days I actually do.

She comes in on a Thursday, towel slung over one shoulder, walking casually over to the pool and slinging over her legs until she’s in up to her shoulders. Tucking her hair into a tight bun, fingers moving, working, prodding loose strands up into the pale elastic. And then she lines herself up and kicks off the far wall, arms slicing neatly through the water, her feet kicking lightly behind her.

No one tries to buy ice-cream in the half hour she’s in the water. I sit on the stool in the cabana with the fake old leather clinging to my thighs in the heat, sweat lining any interaction I have with anything, sipping on lukewarm water for something to do as the afternoon slips away slowly. This week, she doesn’t buy an ice-cream. She stretches a little, wiping the water from her legs and shoulders, and then she leaves, as unceremoniously as she came.

...

She comes on Thursdays. This is a pattern I have discovered over weeks of observation as the summer holidays have rolled into the first weeks of university. I sit behind the cash register and I have a book open on electrical engineering, even though I’m not reading it. I was reading it – or trying to – until she came in at three, facing away from me, in the pool without so much as a second glance. The ice-cream freezer hums persistently behind me, a chorus to my vigil, the day as stagnate and hot as dam water. The heady stink of chlorine and sweat rolls off the water.

After her swim, she sits on the edge of the pool, feet dangling, her back sinking and rising with heavy breaths. And then she manages to stand, her long legs hanging from her like eucalypt trunks, with her hair running down her back and water beading along her skin. And when she walks, I realise movement is something I have taken for granted the entire nineteen years of my life.

I think of ways I can convince her I’m cool as I hang inside the overheated cabana like a limp penis. I’m fleshy and uncoordinated and about as far from being cool as possible. My hair is damp from sweat and oil and is hanging like a sad foreskin.

Instead of heading straight out the gates, she makes her way over to the cabana this time. The cabana I am currently baking in, with an engineering textbook I’m clumsily slapping shut. Me with my foreskin hair and my dazed, sun-baked eyes unprepared for this twist in my usual routine of observing from afar.

‘Do you have Milo cups?’ She asks. Her eyelashes are stuck together with water. Blue, blue, blue. It’s all I can see.

‘Um, yeah,’ I say, turning mechanically to the freezer. ‘Just the one?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Two-fifty,’ I say, and she passes over the coins. It’s a handful of shrapnel – five cents, ten cents, a couple of twenties. I think she expects me to count them out, but I just take her word for it.

‘Sorry about all the coins,’ she says, her face pink with the energy of the swim. ‘Needed to get rid of them.’

‘S’okay,’ I say, and she smiles, taking her ice-cream, and this is the end of our interaction. Weeks of observing and mulling over sensuous moments in the pool shed have come to this, this stilted, empty interaction between strangers. And this lack of fruition seems to weigh heavily on me the rest of the day. It feels like a missed opportunity.

I walk home on my own, listening to the bats screech from the trees.

...

It’s a Thursday, and I’m at the uni bar. I’ve separated myself from my mates momentarily in an expedition to refill my schooner when I spot her. She’s angled towards me, hair kissing along her shoulders and down her back, spaghetti-straps pressed up against her shoulders. I must be staring at her, because her eyes find mine after a short moment, widening a little with recognition.

‘Oh hey, you’re the guy from the pool,’ she says, moving past her friend, beer sloshing uncomfortably close to the rim in one hand. ‘The ice-cream guy.’

She’s close to me now, close enough I can see those clean blue eyes. ‘Yeah,’ I say, even though ‘ice-cream guy’ isn’t a title I’m particularly happy answering to. ‘I’m Will,’ I add.

‘Imogen,’ she says, and we stand awkwardly in front of each other for a blank moment. Eventually she says, ‘so you study, too? Alongside the pool-work?’

She says this like I measure the chlorine or something, adjust the salt levels and change the filters. Like my job extends beyond the cabana, beyond ice-cream sales.

‘Yeah. I’m studying engineering here,’ I say, and she bobs her head, pretending to look impressed.

‘Cool. I’m an Arts student.’ I don’t think my face does anything, but she immediately says, ‘I know, not as cool or practically useful as engineering.’

‘No, that’s great,’ I say. ‘Arts is great. What kind of arts?’

‘Political Science is my major. Minoring in French and linguistics.’

She’s managed to get even hotter. I imagine her saying something to me in French, something about liberalism and British appeasement of interwar Germany. Her eyes watch mine and she knows none of this. I try to let my face give away nothing.

‘French. Nice. Do you eat a lot of cheese, then?’

I say the words before I realise what I’m saying. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh. ‘I guess so. I probably eat the standard amount of cheese.’

I’m considering swan-diving off the nearest tall building when she gives me a quirky kind of look, and says, ‘what about you? Big fan of cheese?’

And she’s rolling with it. She’s still talking to me, somehow. Despite the fact I look like a limp penis and I have the emotional intelligence of a Labrador that’s been hit several times by a car but is still trying to drag its broken carcass endearingly across the bitumen.

‘Yeah. I mean, who doesn’t like cheese? It’s great. Very tasty.’

It’s this point I catch my friend’s eyes across the room. My group of male engineering friends who enjoy binge drinking with the boys and fester in each other's maleness. One of them – John – seems to notice first, and goes around elbowing the rest of the group. They start pointing and making rude gestures. My face definitely goes red, and Imogen glances over to them. John has proceeded to hump Peter’s leg, beer sloshing, as the others cheer.

‘Ignore them,’ I say quickly. ‘They’re stupid. They’re engineering boys.’

She raises a critical eyebrow. ‘And you’re not?’

Another face flush. ‘I mean, in principle. I–’

Her friend tugs on her elbow, saying something I can’t hear over the hum of music and general conversation. Her face angles away from me, listening, and her friend starts to pull her away. She turns back to me briefly, and says, ‘I have to go. But I’ll catch you later, yeah?’

I feel myself deflating. ‘Yeah, of course. I’ll, um, see you later.’

I watch her go as she turns, her dress shifting around her waist with her legs, tapering down to small ankles hugged in black leather sandals. And I wonder if that was ‘The Escape’ that girls do. If she was signalling to her friend, help, and I am in fact the creep. I feel like the Labrador again, rolled into the gutter, broken and unable to move.

John comes over now he’s stopped trying to sexually assault Peter. ‘Scare her off?’ He asks, clapping me on the shoulder. I shrug, embarrassed. John hands me his beer. ‘Drink up, softcock. There’s plenty of birds in the sea.’

I take the beer from him. ‘No, John. There’s no birds in the sea, because birds can’t fucking swim.’

‘They’ll be swimming when they take a look at this beautiful specimen,’ he says, gesturing to his pants as we make our way back over to the boys, and I shake my head.

‘I hate you. You’re disgusting. You do realise that is appealing for no one but yourself, right?’

John grins, undeterred. ‘Will, my boy, watch and learn. Watch and learn.’

...

I do watch, but I certainly don’t learn. John approaches girls and they flee like he’s carrying the Black Plague. Maybe it’s the horrible shirt. Maybe it’s the stink of desperation and Lynx aftershave. Whatever it is, it isn’t working.

Imogen never comes to find me, and I settle on the fact that I was the creep and I’m the lowest common denominator of men. I look at my groin and I hate it. Look what you’ve done. I’m just as desperate as John but less obvious about it. I sit on a bar stool with my feet up and I watch a few of my mates play pool, sipping occasionally at my beer, looking out for a girl who has definitely gone home.

John returns from another unsuccessful exploration of the remaining girls in the pub. He’s known by face by most of them now, and I assume there’s a code word they pass around to signal his impending arrival. His movement towards a new pack is met with turned backs and muttering, and John, undeterred, swings around to the next. His persistence would almost be admirable if it wasn’t so pathetic.

I don’t blame them. I’d do the same thing if I saw an unsocialised engineering student heading my way too.

John falls into a seat beside me, slapping his beer down on the table. He shakes his head like a farmer surveying his fields in drought. ‘Looks like your bird took flight, mate.’

‘Or drowned, if we’re sticking to the same metaphors.’

John’s beer-addled mind tries to piece together these references to metaphors and earlier conversations. ‘Right. Drowning. Why is she drowning?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

John doesn't worry about it at all. He yells some things at the people losing in pool and downs the rest of his beer like it’s water. I tell him I’m catching the bus home, that I’ve got work to do, but he’s preoccupied with a blonde at the bar so I sling my backpack over one shoulder and make my way to the exit just as Imogen is coming back in.

‘Oh, Will,’ she says, looking surprised to see me. Her eyes drift to my backpack. ‘Are you leaving?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, telling myself I’m not incredibly excited to see her. This sudden pounding of my heart is some casual tachycardia and nothing more. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

‘On a Thursday? At ten o’clock?’

‘Um, yeah.’

‘Sorry I left before,’ she says quickly. Her face flushes a little pink. ‘My friend Cassie had some…uh…boy troubles. Sort of weird.’

‘Oh right, that’s cool.’ I pause. ‘I thought maybe you wanted to, like, get away.’

‘Get away?’

‘From me.’

Her eyes widen. ‘Oh, not at all. I was actually really enjoying talking to you.’

‘About cheese?’

She laughs. ‘Sure. I mean, I figured we’d explore different avenues of conversation later down the line. But cheese was good.’ There’s a break, and she shifts on her feet. I wonder if she’s cold in the dress. ‘Where’re you heading? I was probably going to head off too. Maybe we can walk together.’

‘Chancellor’s Place. I needed to stop by the HASS library first, though. Think I left my water bottle there.’

‘Sounds good,’ she says, her cheeks tucking into a smile. We start heading towards the library, up the stairs and past the food court, the sky clear and dotted with stars. The early spring night is crisp and light. Imogen swings her arms slightly as she walks.

‘So, good night?’ She asks, and I tell her about John. She screws up her face as we walk. ‘Yuck. Yeah, probably not the best way to get a girl.’

‘And what’s the best way to get a girl, then? From the female perspective. This is a very rare opportunity for insight, for me.’

She looks at me sideways, her expression light. ‘Well, cheese is a good place to start.’ We both laugh. ‘Okay, I’ll stop. Listening, I guess. I feel like a lot of guys don’t listen.’ She looks at me properly. ‘You listen.’

‘Do I?’

‘I think so. I get that impression. That you’re listening to what I’m saying and you’re caring about it even if it’s stupid.’

‘I don't think you’ve said anything stupid.’

‘Exactly.’

Cicadas hum from the jacarandas hanging overhead, our words folding into the night. Shadows crawl along the sandstone walls in the Great Court, the moon hanging like a silver coin in the cloudless sky.

‘So your friend, and her boy trouble. That sounds interesting,’ I say, breaking the quiet.

Imogen looks over at me and rolls her eyes. ‘Hardly. It’s an ex-thing. I think this is the fourth time they’ve gotten back together. It’s like a carnival ride. Up and down and over again. We’re all a bit sick of it, to be honest.’

I tap my student card to get us into the library after hours. ‘And what about you,’ I say, feeling uncharacteristically brave. ‘Do you have much boy trouble?’

Imogen shrugs innocently, walking in front of me. She turns her head over her shoulder slightly, so he can look back at me, only for a moment. It’s a coy look. ‘Well, there’s this boy who sells me ice-cream every Thursday,’ she says, her eyes steady. ‘He’s pretty cute. But we never seem to get past two-dollars-fifty.’

I swallow heavily as we head into the bookshelved area. I’m not sure this is actually happening. We’re not looking for my water bottle any more. I’ve forgotten I’ve ever actually owned a water bottle, to be honest. We’re walking through the shelves and somehow she’s taken my hand without realising it, and before I can come up with another throwaway line about cheese her hands reach for my face and we’re kissing. My back is up against a collection of books on Egyptian agricultural techniques, my hands finding her waist, her fingers digging into my hair. And I can’t believe it. I’m making out with a girl in the agricultural section of the HASS library, the same girl I’ve been thinking about for weeks, and this is better than anything my mind could come up with.

Someone walks past us, and she moves away. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes glassy. They roam across my face, and she backs away a little, her cheeks kicking into a cute grin. ‘Well. I’ve never done that before.’

‘Kiss someone?’

‘No,’ she says, laughing. She steps backwards, motioning to the bookshelves and me as if it’s self-explanatory. ‘This. Make out with a guy I hardly know in the library, of all places.’

We start walking back towards the entrance. My water bottle has all but been forgotten, a relic of an earlier conversation. ‘It was very spontaneous.’

‘I know,’ she says as we head back out into the night. ‘I sort of just went with it. I think I did an OK job, actually.’

‘You did a great job. A very, very great job.’

She seems to like this. She smiles at the pavement as we walk, and she takes my hand lightly. It’s a casual hold, her fingers tucked gently around mine, intertwined until I can feel her knuckles brushing up against mine. Oddly, it feels more intimate than the kiss. And I think it’s the beer, probably, helping us along.

‘I’ll see you on Thursday, then, for the swim?’ She asks.

‘Or I could see you on Saturday, maybe, if you’re free.’

She gives me that same coy smile. ‘What, to swim? I don’t usually swim on Saturdays.’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of something we do together. And something other than swimming.’

‘So like a date?’

I’m blushing again. God damn it, face. ‘Yeah. I guess so.’

She seems to take pleasure in my awkwardness. Perhaps she likes this feeling. This feeling of being in charge. Like she has me by the metaphorical balls, because she totally does. She could tell me to jump off a cliff and I’d ask her if she’d like me to sell her an ice-cream on the way down.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘You, me, and a wheel of brie, pool boy.’