At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [162]
“You’re swimming,” MacMurrough told him.
He swallowed water, but he came up beaming. “I think I am too!” He turned and plunged, thrashing his arms. “It’s easy sure!” Later, he said, still suffused with the wonder, “I never knew. I never thought it could be like this. It’s the most wonderful thing.” He stayed long in the water that day. He had found his element. He was in the swim.
Now, this afternoon six weeks on, MacMurrough came out into the crisp air to watch his dive. There he stood on the board. Not a von Gloeden study: the boy was too clad and the sky too dull: but reminiscent nevertheless. The unaware posture, the vital glow, limbs atop some ruined pilaster. He springs. Hands touch toes, but the knees are bent. Not so much a jack-knife as some brand of collapsible fork. We shall have to return to the diving. His arms the clear blue glass divide, ripples his body below. An Urning poem.
MacMurrough smiled. Anyone might know such a boy. But to know him best, one must know him slow. And these days, and most especially their afternoons, passed wondrous slow and leisurely. He went to his cubicle and dressed.
He smoked on a pool-side bench while the boy completed his lengths. Cold March day. It had drizzled earlier, but now the sun strained for a last shine. Over his shoulder stretched the Crock’s Garden, but they did not walk there. No, to be sure, they did not walk the pier nor any part of it, and the boy even now could scarce bring himself to look that way. With impersonal eye MacMurrough viewed the sprawl of rocks, pretentious temples, scraggy veronica bushes, unlikely genus for the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Bashful puzzled awkwardness—it had draped the boy like his home-made bathing suit when first these lessons had begun. But the boy was changing rapidly. He was shrugging that old skin; as his confidence grew, daily he shrugged it further. An adventurism pulsed inside, which every so often MacMurrough might trip, as when he asked the boy what had occurred in the Crock’s Garden. Every so often it tripped into alarming ventures of its own, as when the boy asked MacMurrough—they were eating their ices on Doyle’s Rock—would he ever kiss another man.
Would I kiss a man indeed. And what had the boy answered to the Crock’s Garden? Sufficient for MacMurrough to tell him to stop. That he need not speak of it, nor dwell on it. That there was a difference between the dark and privacy. That the consequences of an action depended as much on the actors as on the deed. That the same deed, talking for instance, might be a chore or a delight, depending on the other. That if the other were special to him, the deed too might be special. In short, and unspoken, that with his friend he should feel different.
For one might choose to leave the garden of Eden or one might dawdle there till expelled: either way, go one must. And the boy had said, quite simply, Yes, I know that now.
And now the boy had completed his lengths. He crawls to the bar, pulls upon the ladder, his bag of jewels shrunk in their cloth. Stands in that hunched way, blowing through the hands, which ever marks the swimmer returned to land. Shiveringly takes the towel MacMurrough proffers.
“How many lengths?”
“Thirteen each way.”
“How far is that?”
“Five hundred and twenty yards.”
“Not bad,” MacMurrough allowed. “No resting?”
“None at all!”
Shocked that any should doubt him. “You might try resting. On your back. You’ll have to rest when you swim to the Muglins. Might as well practice it now.”
The boy considered and nodded. His half a medal dangled from his neck. It recalled to MacMurrough a ballad Nanny Tremble had used to sing. The lovelorn lass who spurns the sailor, not knowing him for her long-lost love, till he shows her the half of her ring he has worn these livelong salty years.