Boy Underwater

‘I have,’ shouted Lance, sticking his armpit in my face as he shoved his hand up. Belvedere Blatt said he had too, and so did Laura Pinter and Elizabeth Fisher (though she just needed a wee).

‘Great,’ the man said, nodding. ‘Well, you’ll be our demonstrators. If you could just slide into the pool please, and –’

‘But I’ve passed Level FIVE,’ barked a voice from right behind me.

It was of course Billy Lee. He strode to the front and put his hands on his hips, the jet-black goggles strapped on to his forehead making him look like a giant bug. Everyone else sort of shrank back from him – apart from the teacher that is, who nodded admiringly. He asked Billy if he could dive and Billy said of course. The man nodded again and I could tell something: Billy had forgotten about our race. He was so intent on showing off that he didn’t care about it. The man stepped to the side as Billy put his goggles over his eyes. He did this elaborate stretch with his arms, and then hooked his toes over the last tile near the edge. He would have dived in if Lance hadn’t called out,

‘Wait!’

My friend. My so-called BEST friend. Billy would have spent the entire lesson demonstrating his incredible skills. He’d have forgotten about me. I could have plonked about in the shallow end until it was time to go.

BUT NO!

‘Please, sir,’ Lance shouted, ‘Cymbeline’s got Level Five too!’

‘Cymbeline?’ the man said, looking around at all the girls. I get that A LOT.

‘Here,’ Lance said, pushing me forward. ‘He’s EPIC at swimming.’

A hush developed. Everyone looked at me. Most of the class looked at me with expectation. The swimming teacher looked at me as if he very much doubted what Lance had said and Billy Lee looked at me with what I can only describe as a hideous, terrible glee. Because he’d realised. He’d either found out somehow, or he could just tell by looking at me, but he knew: I was not epic at swimming. And not only that. He could tell that I’d never been swimming at all.

‘Yeah,’ he said, holding up his hands and stepping behind me. ‘Don’t ask me, sir. Ask Cym. He’s incredible. He can do butterfly. He can even do some other strokes I’ve never heard of. Moth, wasn’t it? You should demonstrate, shouldn’t you? Show us all how it’s done, Cym. GO ON!’

And I felt two hands on my back. Billy’s hands. And then I found myself moving.

Forward.

And then I felt myself

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Swimwell.org has quite a bit to say about diving. It is, says Swimwell.org, the action of ‘leaping or springing into water’. I had not, however, paid much attention to this part of their website as I really hadn’t thought that, on our very first school lesson, we’d be doing that. So, when I entered the water below me, it wasn’t with a dive so much as a sort of tangled upside-down ouch. Water, as I found out then, HURTS. I blame the pain for what happened next. After the initial shock, I did not panic. No. I put the knowledge I had learned on Swimwell.org to use. I started to move my arms like windmills, just like the woman in the pictures had done. I started to move my head from side to side. Both of these things should have sent me bulleting to the other end of the pool, where I would have been able to execute a perfect tumble-turn (minus bubble bath). For some reason this did not happen, something I intend to inform Swimwell.org about in the strongest possible terms.

I did not, as they said I would, go forward. Instead, to my intense surprise, I went down, entering what seemed like another world in which you couldn’t really hear anything. Everything was blue and when I looked around I saw bolts of white light whipping round. I saw legs wiggling across the pool, and then I saw something else. It was, I realised, the bottom of the pool, and it was coming towards me. Fast. And then I felt it, with my head, after which I felt sort of floaty and not particularly concerned that I was now at the bottom of a swimming pool. At least I’d done it – I was swimming, though not how most people do it, I admit. Then I felt something else, a sort of emptiness around my waist that I couldn’t quite understand. I was about to investigate when I heard the

It really did sound like an explosion. It came from above and I looked up to see a mass of bubbles and foam coming towards me, out of which two hands appeared, which hooked themselves under my armpits. Then I felt myself rising, up out of this quiet new world, sound suddenly smashing back into my ears as I hit the surface. What happened next is the COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER that I was talking about before. My rescuer pushed me up against the side and, as I held on to the edge and gasped, I looked up, confused. For there was the man in the red shirt. He was standing above me with a long pole in his hand. Miss Phillips was there too, bending over and looking horrified.

So who had jumped in to get me? Billy Lee? It must have been. And I’d never live it down, not EVER. But Billy was standing at the back with his mouth wide open. Everyone was there except …

It was only when I turned to the left that I saw who it was who’d rescued me.

Veronique Chang.

I found out later that Veronique’s on Level 9, or whatever it is that lets you swim for the borough at the national finals. She’d just climbed out of the water and was grabbing my arm to pull me out. Seeing her do that, Miss Phillips reached forward for the other one.

‘NO!’ I screamed, spitting out water like a stone fish in a fountain. ‘Please don’t pull me ou—’

But it was too late. My legs kicking, I left the swimming pool, though not quite as I’d entered it. Earlier, I’d tied the cord on my dad’s swimming trunks as tight as I possibly could. But it wasn’t quite tight enough.

‘I can see his willy! I CAN SEE HIS WILLY!’

Marcus Breen. That was him. And if you haven’t got one in your class you can have ours.

You can come and get him, ANY TIME.

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‘Hello,’ I said when I got home later. I was talking on the phone to a man from British Airways. ‘May I book two tickets to Australia, please?’

‘Er, yes,’ the man said, possibly taken aback by my young-sounding voice. ‘When would you like to travel, sir?’

‘Today, please.’

‘Oh. Right. And which city do you want to go to in Australia?’

‘Which …?’

‘Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or Perth?’

I hadn’t thought about that. ‘Which one is the furthest away from St Saviour’s School, Blackheath, Lewisham?’

‘I don’t know, sir. It’s not a question I’ve ever been asked before.’

‘Oh. Okay then, how about this? Which of them, do you think, is the least likely to EVER be visited by someone from St Saviour’s School, Blackheath, Lewisham? I mean, like, NEVER?’

I never heard the man’s answer, so I can’t tell you what it was. My mum came in and saw me with her bank card in my hand. I thought she’d be mad but she just gave me a soft smile and pressed the red button on the phone before putting it down on the kitchen table. Then she interfered with my hair.

‘Australia, hey? A holiday?’

I looked at her. ‘No. We’re going to live there.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, though I thought about France first.’

‘France?’

‘Because of the chocolate croissants. But it’s too near. Rachel Jones went there on holiday last summer. She still bangs on about it. She might see me.’

‘And you don’t speak French.’

‘I know. So that’s why I thought of Australia. It’s the furthest country from us for one thing, but I saw an Australian cricketer on the telly last week. He was speaking English. Sort of.’

‘Right,’ Mum said, and I thought she was going to laugh for some reason. But the trembling of her lips didn’t turn into laughter. She was staring at me, hard, and then she reached out to take my hand. She was wearing her red jumper, the really itchy one, and the sleeve scratched against my wrist. She tried to mouth some words.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Cymbeline, I’m sorry I never took you swimming. I really am. I’m so, so sorry.’

And so she should have been! And I nearly said that. But what she did then stopped me. I’ve told you about her crying, haven’t I? But she’d never cried like this before. I thought crying was done with your eyes mostly, and your mouth a bit. But when Mum started to cry it was with all of her. Her shoulders moved up and down and her throat made this weird croaking noise. Soon her whole body was shaking, like the washing machine when it’s nearly finished, and all I could do was watch her. She kept saying sorry, sorry, over and over, or at least she tried to because she couldn’t get the word out properly. She clutched her stomach and shook, my wrist really itching now, but unlike the washing machine she didn’t slow down and go quiet again. She carried on, and on, and on, trying to say sorry, and I heard myself say it’s okay, it’s okay, it was nothing really, just the whole class seeing my willy after the best girl in the entire world had seen me floundering around and dragged me out of the swimming pool. Don’t worry about it. But Mum didn’t seem to be able to hear me. It was like – and this may sound weird – she wasn’t saying sorry to me at all. But someone else. It was like there was someone else there, with us in the kitchen.