The Entrance

photograph by les roberts

Now that I am grown old and live my life in a sort of wispy solitude, I am drawn to the pool. 

            I wake each morning at thirty minutes before sunrise.  I don’t know how that works, because of course as the seasons unfurl themselves the sunrise slowly creeps forward in time and then reverses and subsides backward again.  I suppose it’s only the stirring light whispering a wakeup to me, but if it does I retain no memory of it.  Each morning at that same moment relative to the approaching sun, without even a moment of transitional alarm or confusion, I am simply and suddenly awake.

            I lie in perfect stillness and watch the blue-grey predawn light slowly accumulating in my bedroom, soaking in through the shutters of my window and diluting the end of the darkness.  A pale blotter gently mopping up the night’s dregs.  I like the process: I like just watching it happen.  It’s like being born every day.

            When it becomes possible for me to read the maker’s name on the face of the old alarm clock on my dresser, I know it is time for me to go.  I don’t bother to look at the actual hands of the clock because they are stopped at twelve minutes past something and have been so for at least ten years now.  I don’t need the hands anyway.  My days are not measured by time but by light.  I rise.

            In the bathroom I stand and piss easily, and grunt in soft satisfaction that I can still impress myself daily with this simple act that now eludes and tortures my few remaining contemporaries.  A splash of water to the face, a brief stare of dismay at the visage of my long-dead father’s ghost in the mirror, and my pre-dawn ablutions are done.  

            Dressing is a matter of seconds.  Dark blue Speedo ‘budgie smugglers’, then a pair of loose khaki shorts and an even looser old flannel shirt.  Leather sandals worn comfortably down to cradle their shallow casts of my feet.  A faded and thin towel around my neck like a scarf.  And finally, outside the kitchen door, a bicycle.  It has the ladies’ frame with a dropped top rail, because I care less for the regular jibes I suffer about ‘forgetting to wear my skirt’ than I would for the occasional ball-bruising mishap if I tried to use my unreliable hip to throw my leg up and over a more macho model.  And thus clad, shod and mounted, I take the field for another lone tilt at the world.  It’s a brief encounter: in just under four minutes of easy pedalling I am at the pool.

The pool is more formally known as The Entrance Ocean Baths, and is actually a series of three connected pools of different depths and lengths, all of which are directly fed and constantly refreshed by the adjacent Pacific Ocean … sometimes refreshed unexpectedly and even violently, when rough weather causes the waves to break against the concrete wall and smash over the top to dump foam and confusion onto bathers doing their laps in the pool’s ocean-side lanes. 

            But I don’t use the big pool where the swimmers plough their endless lonely furrows.  I am one of a group of old friends who meet in the smaller walking pool at sunrise every day.  And ‘old friends’ is an accurate term in more ways than one, because each of us is aged closer to ninety than to eighty.

            We walk in water that varies from hip deep at one end to about nipple deep at the other.  Fragile bones, shrunken sinews and untrustworthy tendons are thus cushioned from even the moderate strain of carrying our own gradually diminishing bodyweight.  And so we are able to not only walk freely, but can even cavort a bit, rejoicing in the liberation of unearthly buoyancy just as the Apollo astronauts did when they capered in childish joy in the low gravity of the moon, in spite of their cumbersome space suits.

            It’s twenty-five paces from one end of the walking pool to the other.  Easy enough at the shallow end, but each step becomes harder, slower and shorter with increasing depth.  We walk together in our regular pairs for a while, pairs that no one can recall the genesis of but that nevertheless are inviolable now.  Then one or the other of a pair will stop for a ‘spell’, and when he does so his mate continues on solo.   And even when the spelled bather takes up the trudge again, it’s alone.  You always stay in your pair until one bloke takes a break, and then you’re both on your own until tomorrow morning.  That’s just how it’s done.

There are six of us, and we have known each other for sixty-five years.  We all met on the same day in December 1944, when we were allocated a tent together in a dusty army camp in Queensland.   Bill and Clarrie were city boys, but the rest of us were from the bush.  Athol was a drover.  Little Pat had been a shearer and more recently a miner.  Big Pat was a grazier’s son, and had defied his father to enlist before it was all over.  And me.  Walter.  Wally.  Whippet.  I did a bit of everything back then: fencing, scrub clearing, boundary riding ... anything without a roof over it suited me best.   I even rode a motorbike.

            And there was one other, because there were originally seven of us baking in that tent in the summer of 1944.  But young Stainless went away a few months later when we landed in Borneo for one of the last land campaigns of the war.   He wasn’t really named Stainless of course, but his mother had christened him Stephen Stuart Steele so we had no option.  And he didn’t really go away either.  Well most of him didn’t.   We carried most of him back to company headquarters wrapped in a rubber groundsheet and loaded him onto the back of a Blitz truck with a pile of empty ration boxes.  We stood silent and looked at the sad, slippery, sagging green bundle that used to be one of us.  It started leaking.  For a bloke called Stainless he made a bloody awful mess on the bed of that truck.  And then the truck started up and he was gone, and that was sixty-five years ago in July and Stainless was just twenty.

We don’t talk all that much, as we trudge up and down the pool.  Even when we’re still in our pairs we usually each keep to our own thoughts.  I walk with Athol, and he seems content to just walk in a sort of companionable silence.   We’ve already said pretty much all we’d ever needed to say to each other I suppose: anything more now would be pointless repetition.  So most days I just say g’day and occasionally make a comment about the weather.  Looks like rain, gonna be a hot bastard later, that kind of thing.  Athol sniffs and looks up at the sky.  He has this look on him that says yes he agrees and no he doesn’t think so, both at the same time.  Consequently Athol’s rarely wrong about the weather, which is a damned admirable ability to have.

            I do say a brief word most mornings to the other four blokes, as Athol and I pass by them in the pool.  Generally it’s some smart-arse remark about how they are slowing down, and maybe they should be doing their morning exercise over in the kids’ splash pool instead.  But I am realising lately that it’s only me who is showing the wear and tear of the passing years.  My body is thin and bony, my hair is gone, and my skin is blotched and mottled.  Clarrie looks ten years younger than me, and Little Pat looks exactly the same as he did way back when he turned sixty-five.  Athol has the same full head of thick wavy brown hair he’s always had, still cut short back and sides and parted square in the middle.  Big Pat remains a solid big bastard, his back marked out in great hard plates and ropes of muscle, while mine is all shoulder blades and spinal knobbles. 

            Only Bill seems to be in the same decade as me, but when I mentioned the other blokes’ remarkable physical condition to him one morning as we shuffled up the ramp out of the pool, Bill looked confused and didn’t reply.  He seemed to have no idea of what I was talking about.  I’m starting to wonder if Bill might be having a bit of trouble with his memory.  I bloody hope not.  That sort of thing can deteriorate pretty fast, and Clarrie would be totally lost without his morning walking pool partner.

This morning I stayed on a little longer in the pool than the others.  Athol looked at me and raised his eyebrows, but I just said that I felt like doing a few more laps to work off last night’s big baked dinner.  The fact is that last night I had just a few spoons of pea and ham soup, and all I really wanted now was to catch my breath before I had to climb those cement steps up to the showers. 

            I walked slowly back down the pool towards the deep end, trying to slow my breathing and letting the water support me.  And for the first time I realised that there was someone else standing in the pool’s deep end right against the end wall, sunk well down into the water with just his head visible.  Not one of our group; they were all up in the showers already.  He looked like a young bloke, but the morning sun had risen enough by now to be streaming in from behind him and in the glare I couldn’t see enough to recognise him.  Still, he looked sort of familiar and so as I got a bit closer I said g’day.  He sank deeper for a moment and his head slipped beneath the surface, and then he came up again, the sparkling water falling like diamonds from his face.  For a moment I saw him clearly and then the sun seemed to expand and my vision was flooded with its yellow light.  And just for that single heartbeat I thought once again about how my days are measured by light and not by time.

The young lifeguard helped the ambulance blokes carry the stretcher up the difficult stairs and then he stood by watching as they rolled it inside and closed the doors.  They nodded to him before they drove away and there was no siren.

            ‘Who was he?’ asked a barefoot woman wearing a floral sarong and a huge floppy hat.

            ‘Just an old bloke who swam here every day,’ the lifeguard replied.

            ‘Every day?’

            ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve been here for nearly two years and he’s never missed a morning.  Set your watch by him, you could.  Sunrise every day he’d be in that pool walking up and down all alone.  Talked to himself a bit sometimes, but still a harmless old bugger.  Then today I saw him just floating there, face down.  What a way to go, eh?’

            The woman looked down at the empty walking pool and shuddered. 

            ‘Awful,’ she agreed.  ‘Was he already gone when you got him out?’

            ‘No,’ the lifeguard said, ‘He was still conscious for a few seconds.  He even spoke to me.’

            ‘Oh?  What’d he say?’

            The lifeguard shook his head in sorrow. 

            ‘It was nothing,’ he said.  ‘Or nothing that made any sense.  He just said, “G’day Stainless, how are you mate?”  And then he smiled and closed his eyes.’

Dedicated to my father, Al (1923 - 1998)