– at school they taught in whispers so as not to wake you. Coach had you running, pounding the pavements in a daily bastinado to Somers Town and back: sometimes you’d whirl your arms in the hope that rotoring into the air might give you some relief. You loathed it, but somehow Coach could always tell by looking in your eyes whether you’d skived. ‘95% isn’t enough,’ he’d say, ‘100% isn’t enough! … Strive! … And give me 105! … And then … give me 110!’ He racked and taxed you with dips, pulls, press-ups, burpees, weights. At home you had a twelve-exercise muscle circuit from garage to attic. Yoked like an ox, you’d spend hours in the living room stepping on and off Dad’s massive two volumes of Sir William Rothenstein’s red-chalk drawings of forgotten ’20s celebrities, watching over and over your favourite video, Love Story. You silently mouthed Oliver’s killer last line to his martinet father: ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Dad had known the man who had written it: ‘Well, he got his thirty pieces of silver, but he’s finished as a serious classical scholar.’
Dad was quieter these days. Sometimes on the cross-London rail journeys to the Crystal Palace Olympic-size pool he’d sit staring into his book, but the page would never turn and his eyes would flicker as if the words were dancing around. As you waited for the last Northern Line back from Waterloo two coppers always hassled you. ‘Excuse me, sir … Is this your … daughter?’ You’d watch the departure board stuck at NEXT TRAIN: HIGH BARNET – 1 MINUTE for a quarter of an hour as they flicked the ends of your wet hair, brushed against your hips and bottom or just stood looking at you with burning eyes. You’d pray that a drunk or a black man would appear to draw them away. Dad used to ask, ‘Why is there never a criminal around when you need one?’ Your faith in him had recently been seriously shaken by the welkin. It was what he called water, the sea, and you’d adopted it because of its resonances of health and close affinity, but when you looked it up in his OED you found that it actually meant the sky.
At fourteen you graduated to the senior squad. Coach wangled you a sports scholarship to the public school where he was co-ordinator of games, but there were still the fees to be found. Dad took on extra work: stuffing envelopes at the Church Commissioners’, cramming Japanese students for Goldsmith’s and, for three months, doing the night shift at a petrol station. ‘It’s the first proper job I’ve ever had,’ he joked. He’d sit watching the weird shadows flitting across the rainbow grease, his fingers shifting on the baseball bat they’d given him, as if on the keys of his beloved Conn tenor saxophone, long gone into hock.
‘All these sacrifices,’ said Mum. ‘All that money. And for what?’
‘For nothing,’ Dad laughed. ‘That’s the point of sport: it’s pointless. A glorious waste of time – though not quite as glorious or as pointless as art.’
Mum lit another cigarette, like a holed, pursued battleship putting out smoke camouflage. You wondered how anyone could think that being the best in the country or even the world was pointless, for nothing. Finally the oil company sponsored you for the rest of the money. ‘I’ve been bought off,’ said Dad, rather sadly. With his beard and big books he’d apparently been scaring away not only the robbers but the customers: they thought he was a black magician.
The new school stood at a confluence of howling Northern winds, large and black like Castle Dracula, but shored up with strutted white-wood CLASP extensions which led to silos containing an athletics track, squash and tennis courts and a fifty-metre pool. The moorland birds didn’t sing, just rattled or shrieked their alarms, and there were no butterflies among the burnt heather stubs and gorse, only – in summer – fat and unnaturally aggressive bees. At least the girls here didn’t moon about but got on with things – somersaulting, swimming, running – but they had an alarmingly mechanical quality, their arms and legs appearing to be jointed like dolls, their glassy eyes rattling and rolling in their sockets. ‘Send in the clones,’ observed Dad on his only visit. He too had noticed that they all had the same permanent, infolding smile: ‘Like the Mona Lisa crossed with the Thurber hippopotamus that has just eaten Dr Millmoss.’ These girls’ only crushes were on themselves.
It was like a prison or a monastery: an edgy sodality with its impenetrable private language – swimmers’ argot, backslung TV catch phrases and an endless roll of nicknames. Tooting, Cheesy, Shaky, Claret … some girls had dozens but you had just these four. You used to get purple-faced after you’d been training flat out – hence beetrooting, through rooting to Tooting; then you’d puke bile and the colour would fade to leave on your skin white lumps like cottage cheese, hence Cheesy; and then you’d tremble uncontrollably for a few minutes, hence Shaky – they used to hum Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘This Old House’ when you walked into the dining room. Claret was because your nose often bled when you got really excited, especially during the wait for a relay changeover …
But there was also a fifth name, the one you weren’t quite meant to hear: at first you thought with a shock that it was ‘Psyche’ they were whispering, but then realized that the moniker that your silences, tempers and hard elbow-points had earned you was Psycho.
The other girls needed to highlight such flaws in order to live with the irritating but ineluctable fact of your beauty. You were the one they always used for the training films, for the posters, manuals and brochures. You even looked good modelling the national team uniform: the skirt’s stiffness somehow folded into sunray pleats, the clumpy shoe-heels lengthened and narrowed, even the awful ribboned straw hat seemed chic, its brim following a salty downward curve until, as if caroming off your left eyebrow, it ascended, just kissing the top of your ear en route to infinity. For hours in front of their mirrors the others sought in vain to achieve that perfect angle until forced to concede what they’d suspected all along – that what had been perfect was you. ‘The Botticellian Butterfly’, one newspaper styled you: set among simple heartiness you looked poignantly inappropriate – embodying delicacy not strength, suppleness not power, your pallor affirming above youth and health some terminal but romantic malady. Your expression was always solemn, even when smiling, but your body always appeared to be well-pleased with itself.
In the school, Karen was your one close friend – or, at least, the only other girl who, while not being a misfit or a rebel, was also somehow tangential. She had suddenly emerged from nowhere – well, from Yorkshire – as your main butterfly rival. Having finished second to you in the Nationals, she was now beginning to overhaul you in practice. If you didn’t care about winning you now discovered that you also hated to lose. Karen was painfully shy, permanently blushing, always ducking her head to avoid eye contact. You loved her gentle voice but she never said much, except once when she tried to get you to teach her how to ‘speak properly’ – your North London accent sounded positively regal to her. You spent countless hours back to back on the SCR sofa, snoozing and listening to Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle again and again – you never did work out what it was all about.
One day, after practice, she told you that Jesus Christ – complete with beard, crown of thorns, pierced hands, feet and side and a sorrowful, all-knowing, all-forgiving look – had been swimming alongside her in the next lane. He’d been doing only a sort of fast dog paddle, but had managed to keep up with her OK. He was trying to tell her how she could swim through her own body and out into the realm of pure spirit … but she said that she hadn’t been able to hear him properly for all his splashing about.
Jesus didn’t come back, but Karen began to sing hymns in the shower, then shaved her head and starved and flagellated herself. ‘All butterflies are crazy, like goalkeepers,’ said Coach. ‘It must do something to the brain.’ They took her away from school, but you didn’t understand why they also felt it necessary to drop her from the team – through it all, her times had been unaffected. Although you did miss her you also felt a certain relief: you breezed the next Nationals at both distances. Sometimes you worried that her madness might have been contagious. To swim out of your body into pure spirit: in those final metres when exhaustion set in and the grey haze descended, you felt as if you might have known all too well what Karen – or Christ – had meant.
The world – as Coach liked to say – was your lobster. You could confirm that all major countries had airports, streets with people and cars, and interchangeable hotels with beds