The Wading Pool

by Steve Finbow

It was the day after mother burned the Christmas presents; I had looked out of the window at the snow and at a grey smudge on the snow the size of an inflatable wading pool. Mother was raking through the ashes and picking out smouldering lumps. At the edge of the smudge, I could just make out the glitter and gold of unburned wrapping paper. I would never know what presents, if any, were meant to be mine. I had watched as my father ran from the house and stopped, as if the cold had frozen him in time and space, and then rushed again towards my mother. It looked choreographed. It looked staged. My mother’s arms were bare and bristling. My father’s mouth was moving. I could not hear what he was saying. He remained calm, as did my mother.

It was the day after this when a car drove up the next-door drive and sheltered in the garage. I had explored the house next door from top to bottom. I knew it inch by inch. I had herded its silverfish, hunted its spiders, and stampeded its beetles. I had licked its walls. I had used its toilet. I had sipped water from its taps. The house had remained empty for the best part of a year. I have no recollection of the previous inhabitants. Not now, anyway. My father warned me against going into the house. I managed to get in through a cat flap. I squirmed in. Squeezed in. It took a while and also took the skin off my right knee. I have a scar there now, bottle-top size, shiny and smooth, incused with the imprint of a nail. The kitchen was all chrome and melamine, Formica and blonde wood. The house had gathered about it a layer of dust giving it an air of rest and repose. The new inhabitants would shake it up, disperse it in the air; it would settle again but in other places unknown to it for a while.

It was about a week later when I first saw her. She was about my age, slightly younger maybe. I had already met her two brothers. They were in their early teens, cropped of hair, newly long-trousered, silent when with others. They were not twins. There was at least two years between them. But they were the same height and weight and looked remarkably similar, so much so that the other people in the street referred to them as “the twins”. The older brother had a Batman outfit slightly too large for him and made from a material I always feared would produce smoke, spark into life, and then flame. The younger brother’s Robin outfit was snug and rubbed his inner thighs. The brothers scouted the neighbourhood for crimes to solve, cats to save, and dogs to scare. I kept, as much as possible, out of their way, and hated them. But I did not hate her. For the first three months that she lived next door, I followed her around like a puppy dog. I spied on her. I sat on swings she had just departed, swings that softly swung. I slid down slides newly shined by her clothes. I sat on one side of the seesaw and dreamed she was on the other, her dress billowing up around her skinny thighs and that quick glimpse of white cotton.

* * *

It was the day after mother burned her wedding dress – it crackled, blazed, giving off an acrid smoke, the smell lingered in the neighbourhood for what seemed like forever – when I was first invited to her house for tea. I arrived early. My father had dressed me in my Sunday best: spit-shined shoes, grey socks with maroon rings around the tops that came to the bottom of my knee, charcoal shorts that came to the top of my knee, a white shirt, no tie, and a dark blue v-neck tank top with light blue stripes. My father had brushed my hair into a side parting and slicked it down with a dollop of his Brylcreem. He had watched me clean my teeth and, as I did, I could hear my mother sobbing in the bedroom down the hall. I brushed hard to drown out the noise. When I pulled the toothbrush from my smarting mouth, the toothpaste had turned a pale pink.

I knocked on the door. I stood with my hands in my pockets, then changed my mind and took them out and then put them back again. When her mother answered and held out her hand I was not sure which of mine to extract from the warm lining of my trouser pockets. I held out my right and she took it in hers. Her hand was dry and finely coated with flour. After she had let my hand go, I rolled the flour in my hand creating small balls, they became dirty and hard and I dropped them to the floor. I followed her mother along the hallway cluttered with bikes, rackets, umbrellas, and boxes still unpacked.

In the kitchen, a table was laid with plates of sandwiches, sausage rolls, crisps, fairy cakes, and, in the centre, a large bowl of trifle flanked by smaller ones of green jelly, and pink blancmange. She came up behind me and placed her small warm hands over my eyes. I blushed and her mother laughed. I smiled and she beckoned me to sit down and she sat next to me. I saw with dread that across the table from us were two more chairs. The brothers came into the kitchen together but moved in different dimensions. The elder brother was dragging his feet, looking down at the floor, sighing, and burping. The younger was hollering like a Hopi, kicking up his legs, rolling his eyes. They both sat and the elder brother reached for the sandwiches cut into triangles; I had seen the severed crusts on the bird table out front of the house. Pink meat paste, pinker spam, ham almost purple, orange cheese and yellow cheese, and white cheese with tomato, and salmon and cucumber in layers. The sausage rolls looked like fat buttery fingers. I chose a salmon and cucumber sandwich and, without a crust to bite off first, as was my habit, I crammed the whole thing into my mouth, opened to chew, spluttered, my eyes became red and watered. The brothers collapsed with laughter, pointed at me, held their stomachs; the younger rolled on the floor. I got the food moving in my mouth and after some time managed to swallow it as the brothers wiped their eyes with the tablecloth. Their mother, all the time at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes and smiling. The brothers ate the majority of the food. I saved room for a large bowl of trifle and jelly with added double cream. I could not eat the blancmange. I saw the brothers digging into it with their spoons, and I found myself looking at the perfect skin of their sister, and imagining that they were in some way devouring her, that the blancmange was what was left of her after she had bathed and become shiny and bright and next to me. I managed to get through the tea without further embarrassment. I hardly said a word. Neither did she but in that silence and the space it warmed between us, we became closer and her brothers became the enemies of both of us.

* * *

It was the day after mother burned our collection of home movies when the girl next door asked me to come play in the back garden. The back garden – a place I had never been. A place of shaded flowerbeds, an immaculate lawn, three steps patrolled by garden gnomes led up to a patio on which were stationed a green plastic table with four matching chairs and the squat robot of a barbecue. I had become a regular in the house, and while the brothers were out caped-crusadering, I spent time with their sister reading and painting. Her Sindies nursed my Action Men, while my GI Joes played butler to her Barbies. We had experimented with kissing but had never progressed beyond that, even though my body urged and surged to do so. She was thin, her face long, her nose turned up but saved from being too cute from a flattening of the bridge. Two weeks after the family had moved in, and workmen were in the middle of fitting kitchen units, she had swung on the stainless still sink and it had collapsed, the sharp edge breaking her nose. I had seen her looking out of the window, a plaster strapped across her face, her eyes swollen, and the skin surrounding them blue, purple, and yellow like a bed of pansies.

I knocked at the door, said hello to her mother, and almost ran along the hallway, through the kitchen and out into the back garden. The sun was dazzling and there was no breeze. In the centre, a bright blue inflatable wading pool, like a navel, and the green hosepipe filling it slowly. She came from behind me and greeted me in the usual fashion by placing her hands over my eyes. She had to stand on tiptoe to do this and I could feel her small but firm belly against my lower back. I slipped her hands from my face, turned, and smiled. She was wearing a red and white striped one-piece bathing suit and curling her toes into the grass. She stepped into the wading pool and, grasping the hose, sprayed me with water, while all the time shrieking. I ran away, sat on the steps, and fumbled with the buckles of my sandals. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and folded it. My football shorts resembled swimming trunks and I decided to wear them in the wading pool. However, I did not want my underpants to get wet and so slipped behind the barbecue and almost falling and tripping on my own feet, managed to take them off and replace the shorts without revealing myself to her. I tiptoed across the grass feeling each clod of earth, each blade of grass on the soles of my feet.

She was kneeling in the pool, the skin stretched tight on her knees. She was candy-striped and grinning. I stepped into the pool, felt the sides and the bottom give to my weight. I could feel plastic nodules underfoot. I sat then kneeled. The water was cold. It came up to my waist. Her grin became a smile became a thin-lipped look of concentration. Her knees touched mine. Hers were slightly warmer. Her eyes landed on me, then darted off, then landed again, like flies in summer. I looked down. A line of ants stitched through the grass. I could see her ribs jutting through her swimsuit. Her hair was wet. She splashed me. I splashed back. I reached out a hand. Her eyes opened wide. I felt myself lifted from the pool. The roots of my hair strained against my scalp, my scalp prickly with pain. Her brothers were shouting things I did not understand. Her mother stood behind me, unsmiling. I felt dull blows on my shoulders. I looked back at the pool. She was hugging herself and crying. Her mother held me by the elbow. I was on the patio, in the kitchen, through the hall, and out the door. I stood there nearly naked. The door slammed and, after a time, I turned and walked away.

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~ This piece was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 and was filed under Short Story, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~