Life is a jungle. Common knowledge, I know, but sometimes I have these lucid flashes when the world bares its teeth to me, so to speak, and reveals its true and bestial cruelty. Intrusions of reality I call them. My mother calls them panic attacks.
One thing we agree on is that the best remedy is water. Being submerged in water that is — drinking it is about as much use as eating or sleeping. So that explains why I'm in the red brick building of my local swimming pool, not feeling too good about life. I'm waiting in a multi-ethnic queue, shuffling intermittently towards a man behind a Perspex screen with a gap underneath it, just large enough to allow the exchange of coins and tickets. It's almost my turn, and I'm a good girl, I count my change out in advance. When I step forwards the face behind the screen is indistinct, obscured by scratches and the bent reflection of the striplight above my head. But the hands reaching for my money are clear: they are big boned, pale, long black hairs climbing up the back of them. They make me feel sick. It's not that I'm queasy about hairy men — I'm not that simple. It's the symbolism I find upsetting, the disembodiment of those big serving hands.
I take my ticket and walk to the changing rooms. An arrow on the wall says 'women' so I know which one to go to. Just think what would happen if the sexes were inadequately segregated. Females being raped, males slaughtering other males, blood running orange on the wet white tiles.
At school they told me I was imaginative.
In the changing room a dozen women are getting dressed and undressed, drying their hair, or forcing small children to do the same. Two teenage girls are here: one white, the other Asian, both thin as feral cats. They're getting ready to leave but taking a long time over it: they keep prowling in and out of their cubicles, whispering to each other, laughing in sharp little giggles. On my way out I glance at myself in the mirror beside the door. I see the girls reversed behind me, gauging the plumpness and whiteness of my thighs.
I enter the pool room. I don't know which is worse, the scour of chlorine or the fug of other people. I was lying. I do know which is worse. As I walk to the water a man like a bear rotates his eyes towards me; he looks at my chest, my face, then adjusts something in his undersized trunks. His wife looked at me as well: now she is pulling a bathing cap onto her daughter's head, doing it roughly, her daughter is starting to cry. I make my way to the shallow end and a leopard — excuse me — a lifeguard, flashes me a smile. I smile back. Why did I do that? I feel like such an idiot when I do things like that. I walk along the non-slip tiles beside the pool and the little bumps massage my feet, dumb little moments of happiness.
When I reach the end I sit down and dangle my legs in, water nipping at my shins. A skinny guy sits next to me. ''The water's cold today!'' he says, ''but that's actually better for swimming — especially if you do as many lengths as I do!'' I slide into the water until I am completely submerged: now he is only a pair of scrawny legs, amputated below the knee, kicking discontentedly back and forth. I push off from the side, still underwater. Through the tinted plastic of my swimming goggles the pool recedes in shades of deepening yellow. The other people are pale flashes, always cut off at some point — sometimes their necks, sometimes their shoulders, bums, and heels. I'm the only one who is whole.
I swim on for a while, frogkicking underwater. But then my breath starts to run out. This always happens to me. It's a burden to have to breathe air: we should have never left the ocean, our species, or at least we should have realised our error and returned. I break through the surface and my ears pop, one by one; then I'm back in a world of splashing, screeching children. I duck back under and swim the rest of the way to the deep end, feeling my lack of oxygen as a kind of excitement emanating from my chest. Once I get my breath back I hold the bar at the side and slowly kick my legs.
''Hi,'' says a deep voice next to me, ''I'm sure I've seen you here before.'' This time I dive all the way to the bottom. I try to stick there, like a flatfish, but my legs keep rising and pulling my body upwards. Maybe if I collect a few of those rubber bricks the kids keep throwing in, that'll weigh me down. Or maybe there's something to hold onto on the bottom, a grill or a handle. Maybe if I grab it my fingers will get stuck, maybe no-one will notice me kicking and thrashing until I'm limp beneath the water.
Maybe, maybe. I'm sick of all these maybes.
Above me people are struggling to improve their flaccid bodies, make themselves more appealing to mate with. I can see their desperation in the white trails they leave behind them. You're all wrong, I want to tell them, you've missed the point: you think you're improving your health up there, but you're only confirming your ignorance. You're just like any other mammals: you fight, you fuck, you breed. You wipe the red slime from your offspring and you bring them up thinking they're better than amoeba, better than fungus, because one day they'll fight and fuck as well.
When I finally surface I'm gasping, I feel lightheaded. There's a strange pleasure in being half dead. It's the pleasure of only being half alive. It doesn't take long for reality to return though: the white light fades and my eyes fill with motley people. I tread water, breathing deeply. I'm preparing myself for a long dive, and who knows, I might get lucky, I might not come back up.
I glance at the lifeguard. He is sitting in the high chair beside the pool, surveying his flock. His eyes look alert but his muscles are relaxed.
One last breath before I go under. I bob up then plunge vertically down, using my hands like upside down wings. Soon I can feel that pressure on my head again, the soothing vice of depth. Down here, with the small white tiles and straight blue lines, it seems easier to move than it does to stay still; so I swim to the centre of the pool, just before the steep incline that rises to the shallow part. I roll over, gripping my nose, watch bodies jump into the water, cloaked in tiny bubbles. I watch others climb out, leaving miniature whirlpools beneath their feet. Humans would be beautiful, I tell myself, if it wasn't for the people inside them.
I keep swimming. At last my anxiety is starting to ebb. It's so hard to describe, this sensation, the thick black poison leaking from my body, draining from my joints, leaving my insides soft and clean. I could almost call it happiness. I swim a whole length underwater, through the mangrove swamp of waterwings and legs. I feel like a tropical fish down here, darting and shimmering beneath the Amazon. I'm getting carried away now. I can't help it, the relief is irresistible — rising to the surface of a polluted sea, to the clean air above, fractured blue sky getting closer and closer. But my choice of metaphor has alerted me to something: I'm not running out of breath. Ordinarily I'd be dancing by now, doing the anoxia jitterbug, legs and arms moving doubletime, heart jiving for the surface. But the idea of breathing just seems irrelevant. It's like that stage between meals, when you've finished digesting the first but haven't started to think about the next. I must have been under for at least five minutes. It seems so easy and natural, turn and kick, glide forwards, or upwards, or sideways, or down. It's like I was born here, underwater. Like I wasn't born at all.
I'm getting a stitch though — for all my blithe talk. I knew I shouldn't have eaten that pomegranate this morning. It's a sharp one too: I imagine a seed squeezing along my intestines, scratching the pink membrane of their walls, flakes of gut ploughing up in front of it. There's a bloating sensation as well — as if blood is rushing to the spot. I stop swimming and double up. Usually that helps with a stitch. Deep breaths are good too, but I guess I won't be taking any of those. The bloating keeps getting worse, so I reach down to touch my side. A moment later I almost throw up. A lump has appeared on my flank, half way between my hip and my ribs. When look down I can see it swelling: white, bloodless skin stretched across a growth the size of an apple. The size of a grapefruit, a football. It's like I'm pregnant, except the bump is in the wrong place and nine months have been compressed into a minute. That's ridiculous, I can't be pregnant. I close my eyes, cover my ears, as if stopping myself from seeing and hearing will also stop me feeling. It doesn't. The bump is almost as big as me now, it is pushing me sideways, arching me back from my own body, further and further, until suddenly it shoots away.
When I open my eyes I see another me floating in the water. An identical copy. Same swimsuit, same yellow goggles, same expression of astonishment on her face. My god I'm fat. Without really knowing why, I turn and swim to the wall, keeping close to the bottom. She must have had the same idea because I can see her watching me from the other side. Suddenly I realise why we're being so uncongenial: we can't let anyone see us together. We're too abnormal to be seen together. We edge away from each other, headed for opposite corners. Once there I take a moment to catch my breath — figuratively speaking. But then comes that swelling again, another lump, fatherless birth, and I feel sick, I don't want to watch what is happening. Meanwhile, in the yellow gloom across the pool, another young woman who could do with losing some weight is gaining it instead, puffing out sideways like an inner tube poking through a tyre. Then two women are facing each other, bubbles of incomprehension rising from their mouths. When it's over I look left and see myself: another perfect replica, only this time her surprise is not matched by my own.
Soon we occupy the corners, all four of them. This is fine until there are eight of us. We try to keep as far from each other as possible, so we'll look less suspicious. There are sixteen of us now, all identical, huddled at the sides and bottom of the pool. We look quite suspicious. We attempt to mingle, swim around with the other people, one or two of us even pop our heads above the surface so they'll think we're normal and we need to breathe. I hear a scream; filtered by the water only its higher frequencies reach me. We swell and divide again, but outside the pool the screams are multiplying faster. Between copies of my flabby back, I catch glimpses of feet disappearing through circular ripples, small children being transported upwards.
I am everywhere now, everywhere I look. I can't stretch my hands out without touching them again, can't kick my legs without hearing my own voice, whinging about being kicked.
Finally a whistle blows. It sounds like a bugle to me, all brass and nice blue trousers, like the cavalry are coming. It blows again. I turn to the handsome lifeguard at the side of the pool.
''Help!'' I call out to him, two hundred and fifty six times. As our identical voices echo off the walls and roof, or come burbling up through the water, they make a sound more like the chittering of insects than the cry of a human being.
The lifeguard's whistle falls from his mouth and tugs on the yellow string looped around his neck. He steps away from the pool, whimpering.
''Help!'' our multitudinous cry rises again. ''Please help me! Please don't leave me here alone!''
We watch his broad shoulders as he flees to the door.
