NINE
The chlorine stink caught in her nose and throat. A child screamed from the far end of the swimming pool in alarm or delight; it wasn’t clear to Gwen. She swung around, lurching, swaying, unsure of her footing on the bleached blue tiling.
Swimmers thronged the pool. A flotilla of inflatables carried a procession of whooping children and indulgent parents diagonally across the main race lanes and towards the lazy river, where water jets urged the tide of people onwards, onwards.
That man on the balcony was still watching her. He peered nonchalantly over the top of his newspaper. She knew him from somewhere, didn’t she?
Gwen grabbed the stainless-steel rail at the edge of the deep end. Held on to it fiercely as the room snapped back into focus. In the dead centre of the pool, ignored by the endless stream of swimmers, one man churned the green-blue water. Floundering. Gasping. Going under for the third time.
It was Jack. Gwen recognised the black Speedos. (How did she recognise the black Speedos? She couldn’t say. It didn’t matter.)
Jack’s face broke the surface again. Another huge gasp for air. His hair was slicked close to his head by the water. His eyes made contact with hers, past the kids on floats, past their attentive fathers, past the boisterous teenage lads who ducked their girlfriends or did handstands underwater. Unseen by them, Jack’s mouth opened in a wide ‘o’ of surprise and horror before his mouth, his nose, his terrified blue eyes submerged beneath the churning water.
‘Someone help him!’ screamed Gwen. She looked wildly around. From the other side of the pool, a lifeguard sauntered slowly towards her. The lad was about twenty, absurdly good-looking, with short-cropped brown hair and startling green eyes. He peeled off his yellow T-shirt languorously, to reveal a smooth, muscular chest and a fuse of hair that circled his navel and ran down into his baggy red shorts. ‘Leave him,’ he told her, his voice warm and dark and calm. ‘He’s mine.’
The lifeguard slipped into the water, and the kids and parents and teens parted before him. He pulled himself towards the floundering Jack with slow, powerful strokes. Gwen felt the frustration build in her, a tensing of the muscles in her upper arms and shoulders. ‘Hurry hurry hurry,’ she chanted, like a mantra.
Just as the lad was about to reach Jack, a long-legged girl collided with him. Her blonde hair coiled like snakes around her in the water. Her tight red one-piece swimsuit was the same colour as the boy’s shorts, and Gwen knew suddenly that she was another lifeguard.
‘Leave him,’ said the girl in red. Her tone was deliberate and her voice was breathy, yet clearly audible above the sound of the pool. She lifted one hand out of the water and pushed down on the other lifeguard’s head. ‘Leave him. He’s mine.’
The young male lifeguard shook her off and pushed his head back to the surface, blowing air through his pursed lips and scattering water with a rapid shake of his head. He pressed up against the woman, forcing her away so that she slowly fell backwards, the swimsuit material stretched tight over her breasts.
The two guards continued to jostle together in the pool, a leisurely exchange of shoves and nudges that was more like a ballet than a fight. Beside them, Jack’s face floated just below the surface, his eyes and mouth wide.
Gwen choked. She couldn’t draw breath. It was as though she was underwater, unable or afraid to breathe in. She wanted to plunge into the pool, drag herself across to the middle and bring Jack to the surface. But her legs were leaden; she could not even slide her bare feet over the cracked blue tiles. Her hands spasmed, and her fingers locked, immovable around the barrier rail.
The thin-faced man stared down from the balcony. He had stood to watch the commotion in the pool. No, Gwen realised, his eyes were fixed on her. ‘Owen Harper,’ she said.
‘It’s Doctor Owen Harper, the thin-faced man called to her. ‘Actually.’
Gwen cursed her paralysed legs, and tried to lunge over the barrier into the water. Her arms had no strength. The crowds continued their unheeding passage around the drowning man. Gwen screamed wildly at the lifeguards. They paused to study her incuriously.
‘Save him!’ Her shrill cry echoed around the swimming pool.
She woke up abruptly, surfacing from beneath her sheets with a wail of misery and fear.
‘Bloody hell!’ Rhys fumbled around on the bedside cabinet, and scattered books and pens on the floor before he managed to locate the light switch. He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘What’s the matter, love?’
Gwen found that her arms weren’t paralysed any more, so she threw them around her boyfriend and started to sob.
She let him clasp her tightly, quietly, until she slowly calmed down. He was good like that, Rhys. He knew when to talk and when to shut up and just say nothing.
She knew she couldn’t explain it, so she lied to him that she’d already forgotten what the nightmare was.
Rhys squeezed her again. ‘It must have been the rain rattling the window. Sorry, love, I know I should’ve fixed it, and now with the storm and everything…’
‘No, no,’ she mumbled. ‘S’all right.’
Rhys held her at arm’s length to look at her. Jerked his head towards the window. ‘And it’s boiling in here, isn’t it? Maybe that rain’s not so bad, I can open the thing a bit and let some air in?’ He slipped out of bed and ambled over to the window. When he cracked open the top pane, Gwen could hear the steady susurration of rain on the pavement below.
Rhys padded through to the bathroom. He left the door ajar, and raised his voice so that she could hear him over the sound of the running tap. He spoke in short bursts as he brushed his teeth. ‘Every time my gran knew a storm was coming in. She’d cover up all the mirrors in the house with bed-sheets. White bedsheets. It was like her terrace house was going into storage. Wouldn’t get unwrapped until the lightning had gone away.’
Gwen smiled to herself, not quite sure if she was amused or sad. She knew Rhys was just talking cheerful nonsense to cajole her out of the fearful mood, to help her completely forget whatever it was that had upset her. But his anecdote reminded her of that alien radiance sprite Torchwood had trapped a few weeks ago in a mirrored box. Toshiko had folded up the reflective surfaces and thrown a dark cloth over it. Would nothing be simple any more, Gwen thought to herself. Maybe she’d never again have normal points of reference for the stories that Rhys told about his family, or about what had happened to him at the office, or something that he and Banana Boat had laughed at in the pub. She could never talk about her own work, and lovely Rhys just didn’t question it because he accepted ‘Special Ops’ was something she could never discuss. He could tell her about Barry’s latest computer cock-up, or the naivety of the young secretary he’d just hired, or the latest crazy diet theory expounded by Lucy in his office. But Gwen never made up any of her own stories to exchange about Special Ops colleagues. She knew from her own police work that it was too easy to get lost in those kinds of fabrications, once you got started.
‘Look at you!’ Rhys was standing in the doorway. ‘You’re on the wrong side of the bed. I got up a bit earlier for a wee and a glass of water – all that Tiger we had with dinner, it just went right through me. When I got back, you’d rolled over onto my side. That’s why I had a bit of trouble with your lamp there. Sorry, couldn’t quite see what was what.’ He stooped down by her side of the bed and started to pick up the books and pens and papers he’d accidentally scattered on the floor. ‘You’ve had quite a few restless nights, haven’t you? Since starting this new job. What’s all that about?’ He laughed. ‘Guilty conscience?’
‘Oh, hark at you,’ Gwen retorted. ‘Guilty conscience about my new job? That’s your mate Gaz talking, that is. Like you never have nightmares?’
‘I always sleep well. The sleep of the just.’
‘The sleep of the shagged, more like,’ she told him. ‘Your post-coital coma is what you mean, Rhys.’
He dumped some of the papers on the bedside cabinet, leaned over, and attempted to snog her.
‘Not fair!’ she protested, laughing, as she smelled the Colgate. ‘You’ve brushed your teeth, and I bet I’ve got bog breath.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well I do,’ she told him. ‘And besides, I need the loo now.’
Rhys stood up to let her out of the bed. ‘I’ll tidy up the rest of this mess I’ve made while you have your wee, then.’
Gwen tiptoed over the cold bathroom lino and left him to sort out the strewn papers. Since joining Torchwood, she’d had restless nights because she woke up with thoughts and ideas and then stayed awake fretting that she wouldn’t remember them the next day. She’d taken to scribbling them on shop receipts and envelopes, and eventually in a small notebook. She trusted Rhys not to nosey around in her stuff, but didn’t trust herself not to lose it, so it was written in abbreviations and codes. Inevitably, that meant her night-time jottings were either in indecipherable handwriting or, when examined in the cold light of morning, just tired rambling nonsense.
‘Is this a new mobile number?’ Rhys called through to her.
She emerged back into their room, still clutching her toothbrush. She wiped one wet hand on her nightie, and took the Post-it note from him.
‘Scribbled out in a bit of a hurry,’ he observed, ‘and not your handwriting. That says “Gwen”, and a number… is that a zero or a six?’
Gwen knew that the scrawled word was “Owen”. He’d shoved his mobile number at her, while giving her some half-hearted cheesy chat-up line. She’d told him to piss off. It was a joke anyway, a gesture, because all the Torchwood phones had everyone’s number programmed in on speed dial. Even so, when she’d emptied the pockets that evening before hanging her jacket in the wardrobe, she’d found the Post-it note still there.
‘Message from the office,’ she told Rhys. Gwen took it with her back to the bathroom, sticking it on the mirror while she had a pee. As she sat, she thought about the dream. Jack in the pool. Owen watching from the balcony.
She got back to the bed, and stooped close to Rhys to get a proper snog. He was sprawled comfortably across his own side, mouth wide open, taking regular breaths.
Gwen listened to Rhys breathing. She went back and retrieved the Post-it from the bathroom mirror. Tucked it into her notebook. Put the notebook on the bedside cabinet. Slipped back into bed with Rhys, and switched off the lamp. Lay in the dark, listening to the ceaseless rain.