The Swimmer
‘Here I was on a Sunday morning, sober, alone, in the river without doing anything, just lying on my back, the water holding me.’ An excerpt from Olumide Popoola’s novel, Like Water Like Sea.
Looking up from underneath, it made the sun blurry. The water swishing against my face, a thin layer, not enough to enter my nostrils. I was looking for her. I wanted to know what it was like, to be drowning, losing your breathing to suffocation. Of course, I didn’t last. I didn’t have enough drive to do it, didn’t have enough reasons. You would have to be invested in the idea, digging deep for this to be your final answer. Nothing like that was on my mind. I wasn’t feeling despair. Not in that way. It is hard to take your own life. I think it is against your own body. Such an effort, incredible. I knew that before I jumped into the River Lea with my clothes on. You had to orchestrate the whole thing and pay attention to the variables.
The only thing I had done was leave Mum’s after the not-so-unusual but still weird morning. For some reason I went straight to Hackney thinking, let’s see this thing, drowning.
Mum was stable as we both called it but on the unstable side of that. She had been rummaging through a big cardboard box packed tight with clothes. I thought she was looking for something that belonged to Johari. It was ten years this year. I thought she was reminiscing, going to tell me a story I did or did not know about my dead sister. Instead, she brought out a long cotton skirt. Its pattern pulled me in briefly, blue and pink and red and green. Vertical and horizontal stripes. Flowers and swirls.
It looked like something my mother would love. Something she had worn on a trip to Palestine in a completely different lifetime when she really worked not just as a fundraiser but also as a witness, as she said. I would have loved to have known the story of the skirt. The story of the trip, the stuff Mum had been doing when she included really in the telling, but her voice already had that edge to it. I could sense that tone even in the tiniest whisper and knew exactly where she was on the spectrum of a manic episode. It was the same with hospital admissions. I would dream she would die and she would be admitted, without fail, soon after that. Sectioned mostly but sometimes she went of her own accord.
The person who had died was Johari. I hadn’t dreamt about her.
A couple of morning joggers slowed down when they saw me. I looked up, ready to defend myself. They looked like one of those couples who shared their hobbies and found that it made their bond stronger...
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