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River Boy
by
Tim Bowler
It didn’t start with the river boy. It started, as so many things started,
with Grandpa, and with swimming. It was only later, when she came to think
things over, that she realized that in a strange way the river boy had been
part of her all along, like the figment of a dream.
And the dream was her life.
Half-past nine in the morning and the pool was crowded already. That was the
downside to summer holidays, especially hot ones like this, but she knew she
shouldn’t grumble: she’d been here since six-thirty, together
with the usual hard-core group of serious swimmers, and she’d managed
a leisurely four miles without interruption.
But she did grumble; the mere sight of all these people flopping
in like lemmings made her want to shout with frustration. She wasn’t
ready to stop yet, not by a long shot. She had energy left and she planned
to use it.
She stuck to her lane, doggedly plowing length after length, trying to ignore
the splash of the other swimmers. Sometimes she’d found that if she
just forced herself to keep on swimming up and down her lane without stopping
or swerving, the other users of the pool seemed by some collective telepathy
to accept that space as hers, and leave it to her.
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