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Everything I’m about to tell you happened years ago, back in 1981, when I was a young woman and still quite naïve. I’ve been thinking about it lately for no reason I can explain except that my husband and I are coming up to our tenth wedding anniversary next month.
The trip to the hot pools in Hanmer was supposed to be a celebration for my twenty-second birthday, but because Pete De Bruin, who was my fiancé in those days, had become very busy at his law firm, the trip had been delayed twice. Meanwhile my birthday had come and gone. In fact, by the time we finally did travel to Hanmer, Pete and I were only six weeks away from our spring wedding. I’d already chosen the dress and sent out the invitations.
Of course we drove up to Hanmer in his car. He was very proud of that car, which was a vintage something or other, and he never missed an opportunity to drive it, especially on the open road.
The interior always smelt bitter to me, like slightly off walnuts, because of whatever brand of wax he rubbed into the leather seats every Sunday.
Pete had told me that he would book a nice hotel close to the hot pools. When we eventually pulled into where we were staying, however, I saw that he had actually chosen a camping ground that was tucked in among the shadow of the hills on the edge of a forestry block at the back of the town. The walls in the unit we were given were concrete block painted off-white. There was a tiny kitchen with a broken kettle and a chipped Formica-topped table.
I remember Pete lying down in the middle of the bed, his eyes fixed like glue on the small television mounted up in the corner of the room near the ceiling. It was a king-sized bed and there was barely room to walk down the sides in the small room. Pete was naked except for a pair of white Y-fronts. He was a big man – solid, you might say. His waist was the same width as his shoulders and his pale legs were enormous. He’d told me the first time we met, at a barbecue at the flat of someone I didn’t know well, that he had been a competitive cyclist in his teens. He said all the riding built up the muscles in his thighs. It was summer and Pete was wearing shorts though most of the other men had dressed more formally in light trousers. He had pulled up the bottom of his shorts and flexed his leg muscles to prove what he was saying about his thighs was true. He also told me that he’d given cycling up when he discovered that the selectors had their favourites and he wasn’t in with a fair chance.
I watched him lying on the bed, trying to judge his mood.
“I’d like to go to the hot pools,” I said. “They don’t close till eight.”
Pete didn’t take his eyes off the television.
“Nah, I don’t feel like it tonight.”
“I just thought it would be nice.”
I pulled the bedroom curtain aside and looked out. It was obvious that most of the other units were vacant. The winter light was already dimming and all the trees in the camping ground were bare. The caravan parks and tent sites were empty. Over by the manager’s office, two boys played with a tyre that hung by a rope from a tree. I could see the swing held no novelty for them. They moved it listlessly, not bothering to climb inside.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to soak in the hot water?” I asked, still looking out towards the office.
“I already said I don’t feel like it. Don’t nag me. You know I hate it when you do that.”
“I might go by myself then.”
“Suit yourself, I don’t care.”
He sounded bitter and I felt bad for annoying him.
Pete never let anyone else drive his car so with my togs wrapped in a towel under my arm I walked the long curved road that followed the boundary of the pine plantation before skirting the edge of the golf course. The pools were even further away than I thought. It grew fully dark as I walked, but there were no streetlights.
Most of my arguments with Pete were like that. If I wanted anything too strongly he got annoyed. When I pushed him too far he sometimes turned very red in the face and resorted to swearing. After each argument I chastised myself and resolved that in the future I’d be more flexible, more understanding of his point of view. Pete was my first serious boyfriend. I truly believed that after we were married things between us would settle into a calmer rhythm.
I smelt the pools long before I arrived. Several giant conifers grew near the entrance, rising so high that even though their trunks were lit the upper limbs vanished into the darkness. I paid my money and made my way to the changing room past the three large circular pools sunk into the ground. Apart from the lights in the water and those hidden among the bushes along the edge of the paths, the complex was in shadow. The air was cold enough that thick steam hung around, eddying slowly over the surface of the water. The steam and shadows made the few people still bathing at that time of year, an hour before closing, as featureless as Roman statues dredged up from the bottom of the sea, their faces worn smooth by centuries of sand and currents.
I put on my togs in the empty changing room. The air, when I came back outside, was bitterly cold on my exposed skin. Holding the rail, I slowly walked through the steam down the steps into the first pool I came to. The water was so hot I had to stop and wait until the sensation became bearable. At the bottom I bent my knees and very gradually, inch by inch, lowered myself until the hot water lapped my shoulders.
There was a submerged seat running around the edge of the pool and I made my way over and sat with my back to the wall. Small black flecks drifted in the water like tatters of burnt parchment. There were only half a dozen people in the pool with me, and by instinct we had spaced ourselves around the rim leaving equal gaps between us. On my left was an Asian couple, newlyweds perhaps, who sat shoulder to shoulder. On my right was a woman with long dark hair hanging down into the water. Opposite me a very old woman wearing a white rubber cap rested with her eyes closed. They all came and went from my view as the steam thickened and thinned.
I sat for a long time, letting the warmth soak into my body, trying not to think at all, until eventually my scalp began to itch from the heat and I was suddenly claustrophobic. I stood so that from the waist up I was out of the water, and turned to lay both my forearms along the dimpled concrete edge of the pool, watching the steam rising off my skin. The cold air was now refreshing.
That was when I felt a sharp prick near my wrist. I gave a small scream and for some silly reason started to cry.
“Are you all right?” It was the woman with the long dark hair. She had moved close to me.
“I think I’ve been stung by a bee.”
“Let me see.”
She gently took my arm and turned it over to inspect my wrist.
“The sting’s still in there.”
Using her fingernail, she scraped close to the blue veins that had been brought to the surface by the hot water. When she held her finger out to show me, I saw, sitting on the inside of her nail, what looked like a small white heart, still beating. It made me feel sick to look at it.
“Didn’t you see the signs?”
She gestured and I realised that on the back of a nearby seat were words printed in red: “BEWARE OF THE BEES. WE STING.”
“No. I didn’t see.”
It was typical of me to miss a sign like that. Pete often said that I was too inside my head, that I had no ability to see what was important. If Pete had been with me he would’ve pointed out the sign straight away and I wouldn’t have been stung.
The woman flickered her finger and the small heart fell onto the ground. She didn’t move away, but sank back into the water next to me, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes so that her dark hair was again trailing over the surface. I guessed that she was about 10 years older than me.
I sat down next to her and tried to forget about the sting, though my wrist was still throbbing. I kept my arm out of the water and occasionally brought it to my lips. Perhaps the night had grown colder because there now seemed to be more steam than before. I couldn’t see anything at all beyond the woman sitting next to me and the small patch of illuminated water around us. Even the old woman in the white rubber cap had vanished.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said.
She murmured like a sleepy child. “That’s fine.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“From Christchurch, but I’m running away.”
I giggled, thinking she was joking. When she didn’t elaborate I said, “How do you mean, running away?”
She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at me. She sighed.
“You’re too young. You won’t understand.”
Naturally I was offended. “I’m not that young. Actually I’m engaged to be married.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence and I thought she’d forgotten me until, still staring into the heavy steam moving over the face of the water, she began to tell me about her life. I sat with the wall at my back and listened. I didn’t say a single word, aware that no response was necessary.
She told me about her two boys and about the man she was married to. There was also a little girl, a baby. Her husband was a drinker. He’d invested all their money in some type of business deal to do with building houses near the beach somewhere. She didn’t believe it was going to be a success. She’d also recently found out that he was sleeping with another woman. There were days when she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed.
I won’t pretend that I remember every detail of our conversation. I can still recall her voice, though, the sound of it, if not the precise meaning. It was odd, the way she spoke to me, a stranger, so openly and about such personal things, but I’ve thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that she wasn’t talking to me at all, not really. I think she was trying to get things straight in her mind and I just happened to be there. Being in the pools helped. I’m certain she’d never have been so open with a stranger if we’d been sitting next to each other on a bus, for example, or on a park bench. There was anonymity in the steam, and in the way only our heads and shoulders were above the water.
“Where will you go?” I asked when I was certain that she’d finished.
She turned her head and frowned as though wondering who I was and why on earth I was talking to her.
“What do you mean?”
“You said you were running away.”
“No,” she said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear. “That was only a dream. My husband brought me here for the weekend. He thought it might cheer me up.”
“Oh. So you’re going back?”
“Of course. I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
I might’ve asked where she was staying or offered to have a cup of coffee with her after the pool closed. She was right, though, I was very young. I understand that now. All I did was stand up and say “Good luck”, though I meant it sincerely.
I waded over to the steps and walked up them and over to where my towel was hanging on a rail. When I looked back, I could just make out the woman’s dark hair through the mist. I didn’t see her when I left the complex and I never saw her again.
I walked slowly in the dark, just thinking, all the way to the camping ground. Pete wasn’t in the unit when I arrived. His precious car was gone from our parking spot. I guessed that, to make a point, to show me who was in charge, he’d driven into town to have dinner without me. That was the type of childish thing he did.
I went inside and packed my suitcase. The manager wasn’t in the office, but his son, who was about my age and good-looking, showed me a bus timetable his father kept under the counter. The last bus to Christchurch was leaving in half an hour. There wasn’t time to walk back into town so he kindly offered to drive me to the stop. His friendly, open face and dry sense of humour appealed to me. I made the bus with only a few minutes to spare.
When Pete called my parents’ house the next day, my mother told him that the wedding was off. Mother had never considered Pete good enough for me anyway. She was happy to tell him that “Cathy has changed her mind”. Listening in the hallway I heard her say that she would appreciate it “if you don’t trouble my daughter again”.
Apart from a couple of nights when I thought I heard the rumble of his car on the street outside our house, I was, in fact, never again troubled by Pete De Bruin, or anyone like him.
Taken with kind permission from a novel told in 21 short stories, The Waters by Carl Nixon (Penguin, $37), available in bookstores nationwide.
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