3
It rained for two days and the pool remained closed. On the third day, a Saturday, the rain was still falling, though only lightly, when Mrs Lonsdale called Wolfgang in after lunch to open up. A bus load of pilgrims had driven up directly from Melbourne Airport. There was also the usual assemblage of private vehicles with interstate plates, and a taxi-van with a wheelchair lift on the back. A heavily-bearded bikie, one leg in plaster, lay apparently asleep in the entryway. Six empty beer cans were lined up beside his crutches on the concrete next to him.
Wolfgang didn’t see why any of them bothered. Nobody had been cured since the famous recovery of Marceline Flavel a dozen years earlier. But the mystique of the sloping pool – the Eighth Wonder of the Worlds, according to the local tourist industry – coupled with the controversial re-naming of the town from Loddon Springs to New Lourdes, were enough to convince the world of the water’s healing properties.
In any case, Mrs Lonsdale was fond of saying, it was good for sick people to have something to hope for.
It was good for the town, too. Nearly every visitor bought at least one bottle of spring water from the pool shop, or a souvenir T-shirt or baseball cap or key ring. That summer Mrs Lonsdale had introduced a range of religious artefacts as well, including New Lourdes Pool rosary beads and snow domes featuring Marceline Flavel standing in an exaggeratedly-tilted circle of water with an angel. (Father Nguyen, in a recent sermon, had pointed out that there was no mention of angels in any of the newspaper records, nor on the tape of the one-hour special Sixty Minutes ran shortly after Ms Flavel’s miraculous healing.)
By the time the last of the pilgrims had left – many with souvenirs, but none with the hoped-for miracle cure – it was nearly four o’clock and the clouds had parted to allow the sun through. Within a short time it became warm and quite muggy, and townspeople began phoning or arriving in the car park to see if the pool was open for swimming. Mrs Lonsdale took pity on them and asked Wolfgang and Michael Hobson if they would stay on for a couple of hours; a largely wasted gesture, as it turned out – despite the initial flurry of enquiries, only fourteen people came through the turnstile.
By five-fifteen it was cloudy again and nearly everyone had left. Only a couple of Japanese tourists with a video recorder and three twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys remained. And the blind girl, in her usual spot beneath the peppercorn.
The blind girl. Wolfgang still didn’t know her name. He should have asked her the other day when she’d asked him for his, but it hadn’t occurred to him until too late. He’d never been good at conversations with girls; they made him self-conscious about the way he looked and talked, and he always ended up saying something stupid or nothing at all.
Mrs Lonsdale went home at five-thirty, leaving Wolfgang with a fluorescent-orange master key and instructions to close up at six. He slipped it onto his key ring for safekeeping. The three boys left shortly after Mrs Lonsdale. They were followed five minutes later by the Japanese couple, each having taped the other from a variety of angles – and with earnest non-stop commentary – swimming, floating and launching various buoyant objects (an inflatable dolphin, an empty drink bottle, a thong) down the slope of the pool.
Michael came over and sat on the wheelchair gate. He nodded in the blind girl’s direction. ‘Shall we kick hippo-girl out?’
It seemed wrong to make fun of her. You could hardly blame someone for being overweight if they were blind. Wolfgang looked at his watch. ‘We’re supposed to stay open till six.’
Michael squeaked the gate back and forth. ‘Nobody else is likely to show up now.’
‘I think we should stay,’ Wolfgang said.
‘Well, I don’t think we thould th-tay,’ lisped Michael.
Wolfgang clenched his fingers. He had never actively disliked Michael until that moment. They ignored each other at school – or Michael ignored Wolfgang, which amounted to the same thing. ‘Go then. I’m not stopping you.’
‘You won’t say anything?’
‘If anybody asks, I’ll say you came down with a sudden case of the runs.’
‘Thanks, buddy.’ Michael leaned close to the ticket window and lowered his voice. ‘Who knows, you might have a chance with a blind one, hey?’
Wolfgang waited until Michael had gone, then he left the office and walked out onto the pool’s wet concrete apron. The sun had broken free of the clouds, catching in the feathers of steam that balanced motionless on the sloping blue water. Watched by the blind girl’s dog, Wolfgang walked the length of the pool. The air was thick with humidity, almost too heavy to breathe. He windmilled his right arm, then his left. Bloody Michael. They could both lose their jobs. It was against regulations to have the pool open with less than two staff members in attendance. Not that safety was an issue today; the blind girl was the only patron and she never went near the water. All she did was lie on her towel all day, fully clothed, with her hat over her face listening to her MP3. Occasionally she sat up to sip from the insulated drink bottle she kept in her backpack, or to pour water from the same bottle into a blue plastic bowl she brought for her dog. Apart from that she rarely moved. Hippo-girl.
When he reached the top of the pool, Wolfgang picked up an ice-cream stick and flicked it out onto the water’s tilting surface. That was against regulations, too, but it was one of the hardest rules to enforce – human nature seemed to demand that you throw something in, just to see it carried down the slope. Tourists, particularly those with video recorders, came halfway around the world to witness the miracle for themselves. Wolfgang had even seen pilgrims surreptitiously dropping things in. The stick floated away from him, its small, broadened shadow sliding along the bottom of the pool four lanes over. He looked at the girl. She still hadn’t moved. Her dog lay beside her, its head rested on its crossed-over paws. Wolfgang slipped off his sneakers and T-shirt. He pushed his keys into the toe of one of his runners, then entered the pool by one of the ladders, careful not to make a splash. The water was blood warm – too warm, really, to be refreshing. Rolling onto his back, Wolfgang closed his eyes and, like a tourist, allowed himself to be carried softly down the incline.
It took about two minutes to cover the fifty metres to the pool’s low end. The padded edging brought him to a gentle stop. He opened his eyes and dropped his feet to the smooth painted concrete below him.
‘Good boy, Campbell,’ the blind girl said.
Wolfgang’s heart lurched. She was barely three metres away, standing partway down the wheelchair ramp with her dog in its leather harness. She wore bathers, a blue one-piece with a sewn-in nylon skirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem as overweight in her bathers as she did fully-dressed. Rather than fat, she looked rounded. Womanly. Wolfgang held his breath and backed slowly away from her across the pool. The opportunity to reveal himself had passed. He should have said something immediately, now it was too late. The dog, Campbell, watched him with what seemed to be a frown rumpling the loose skin between its eyes.
‘Okay,’ the girl said, feeling along the water’s edge with her toes. Her thighs and forearms were prickled with goose bumps even though it wasn’t cold. ‘Okay,’ she repeated, and released Campbell’s lead.
Stooping, her arms outstretched, the girl shuffled down the ramp into the pool. When the water came up past her knees, she bent right forward and plunged her face beneath its glass-clear surface. For two, three, four seconds, she held her face under. Her long red hair floated around her head like a halo. Wolfgang found himself holding his breath as she must have been doing, and hoping, despite his scepticism, that it would work – that the pool would cure her. Five, six, seven, eight seconds passed. Campbell, behind her on the ramp, began whining. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty seconds (Wolfgang had stopped counting) the blind girl lurched upright. Blinking and gasping, pushing the dark ropes of hair off her face, she turned and looked straight at Wolfgang.
He nearly gave himself away then, nearly asked was she cured? could she see? but the girl spoke first.
‘Shit!’ she said.
Wolfgang’s heart raced with a warring mix of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that he hadn’t been witness to a miracle, relief that she couldn’t see him. And he was surprised, for no logical reason, that a blind person would swear.
She swore again, though more softly this time, and with the air of someone who was beyond disappointment. Then she turned and shuffled back up the ramp to her dog.
Wolfgang breast-stroked slowly, his head above the water, all the way to the high end of the pool. It was hard work, the slope was against him, but he was a strong swimmer. He was breathing heavily nonetheless when he climbed the four-runged ladder. Shaking the excess water off himself, he used his T-shirt to dry his hair. His shorts were dripping wet. For a moment he considered going into the men’s changing sheds, then shrugged, removed his shorts and wrung them out on the grass at the end of the pool. Nobody was there to see him – nobody who could see, anyway, Wolfgang thought as he pulled his shorts back on.
Thirty metres away, near the fence, the blind girl had already slipped her dress on over her wet bathers and was scrabbling about on her hands and knees for her shoes. Her movements seemed clumsy, hurried. Were those tears Wolfgang saw on her cheeks, or was it simply the run-off from her wet hair? Her mouth was small and pinched as she tied her shoelaces. Stuffing her towel into her backpack, she took hold of Campbell’s harness and made her way quickly to the entrance.
It was only after she had gone that Wolfgang saw the raffia hat lying on the grass beneath the tree. Pulling his sneakers on, he ran to get it and hurried out through the gate, but already the girl and her dog were on the other side of the road, halfway to Acacia Street. He looked down at himself – no shirt, wet shorts, laces undone – shrugged, put the hat on his own damp head – it was a surprisingly good fit – and went back in to close the pool.