SINK OR SWIM

CIARAN CRIEG

It is a well-mythologised tale of my early childhood–a time that is blurry and only half-remembered–that my mother

deliberately made me terrified of water. And for the rest of my childhood, she tried to undo this terror.

If you look up the word terror in the Oxford English Dictionary, the entries are filled with words like fear, bloodshed, intimidation. The entries for horror use words

like repugnance and dread. Many people use these words synonymously.

Gothic literature draws a line between terror and horror.

Ann Radcliffe wrote about terror and horror being ‘…so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.’ In the Gothic, terror is a brush with the sublime. It is something stirring and unable to be measured.

When I was a child, I did not believe it was possible for me to be killed being hit by a car. Other kids? Maybe. But not me. I had a plan. Drowning, however, always made sense.

There was an afternoon before I became scared of water

when I was stuck in the kitchen with my mum. Her long, cool arms were wrapped around my little four-year-old body

and she had the landline wedged between her ear and her shoulder. There was a lady on the phone. I was small enough that Mum still let me sit on the kitchen countertop.

I looked down over the garden to where my sister was doing laps in the pool. Our pool was dark blue and choppy – a breeze was rolling off the nearby bay and slapping its surface. I watched as her thin, 13-year-old body sliced through the jelly water. She was seamless and mechanical, gliding from edge to edge of the pool. I wanted so badly to be down there with her.

I tugged on my mother’s sleeve. ‘I want to go for a swim,’ I whispered.

The plan was this: I would simply lie down. I knew that there was a bit of empty space between the bitumen on the lie down and avoid being crushed.

It took me years to learn that people do not die from the

weight of the car crushing them, but by the force of the car colliding with their bodies, mangling their precious, fragile arrangement of muscles and bones.

‘But I don’t want to go later.’

Mum frowned and shook her head. I knew there was no

helping it. There was a word I had already learnt: nonnegotiable. I knew that the pool was non-negotiable. And so we stayed there in the kitchen as the sun sunk down behind

the bay. We watched my sister swim until the pads of her fingers wrinkled.

A few months after, I watched Finding Nemo. For the first time, I realised that there was nothing more petrifying than deep, dark water. I was rattled by the vastness of the ocean.

I was terrified that I could be lost to it. It reminded me of

what it is really like to be in water: that feeling of stretching your feet down in the pool and finding no purchase, or when you go to step and there is nothing there. Panic.

When I was fourteen, barely a step from my baby years myself, I babysat for a woman who had only ever smacked

her children for one reason – if they touched the bath faucet.

She knew a family who had lost their toddler from bathwater too hot.

While looking after other people’s children, I had been endlessly attentive to the dangers I knew: the balconies my charges could topple from, the busy roads they could wander onto, the strangers at the door who could snatch them, the bookcases that could crush them, the stuffed toys that could muffle their breath, the batteries that could burn their oesophagus, the inch of bathwater they could drown in. Even now, still, I often feel my throat coating itself with a slick film of horror (real horror, not terror, horror –

sticky and inescapable and shaking) about the moments these things could have happened. Babysitting had been an exercise in keeping those little children alive.

I had known that hot water could turn peachy flesh red. I had known that boiling water from the kettle could blister or burn little hands. But I had never thought of this – bathwater so hot it could scald their little bodies and stop their hearts

beating. Water.

There is a tag on Instagram with over 167,000 posts. Most of them are pictures and videos of children. Beautiful children. Playing and singing and cuddling and learning. The thing these posts have in common is that they are all marked with

#childloss.

Most of the pictures and videos have been carefully lifted

from a treasured family archive.

Most of the children in the pictures and videos are now dead.

Infrequently, I tap in those characters # c h i l d l o s s and visit that community of bereaved parents. I can only observe

their pain from a distance, separated by an ocean I never

want to cross. But I can see this much from where I stand: it

is a different country there.

We watched the news every night while I was in primary school. Every bulletin, every channel. It often made me cry

but I never looked away from photos that would flash up on the screen of other kids my age who had died. They were featured in the bulletins most nights: the horror crashes, the freak accidents, the tragic murders, the backyard drownings. I became sure that those children knew something I didn’t know. I felt as if they had passed into a realm I couldn’t

imagine. A child. Whose eyes had only been open for the briefest of moments, who only had energy zapping through their little body for a millisecond in the scheme of the

universe.

I lost count of the number of swimming classes I was sent to as a child. By the time I was twelve, my mum had exposed me to enough structured swim lessons in community pools that she had undone my fear of the water. I could not even

remember being scared.

In its place was my confidence that I was a bad swimmer. At school swimming lessons, other kids were placed in swim squads with names like The Dolphins or The Sharks. I was always, always in The Seals.

Of learning to swim, I remember the gulping and snorting, my floundering limbs, and the struggle of keeping my head, I never moved up from The Seals. My mum’s anxiety to make me a better swimmer intensified as I grew closer and closer to high school. She had been through that same merry-goround before. At enrolment, she was going to be asked to fill out a form. On that form, a question: can your daughter confidently swim 50 metres? She wanted to be able to tick yes. I think she didn’t want me to feel different to the other girls.

But it had already happened. While other kids enrolled in Nippers, I had started going to orchestra on Saturday mornings instead. I didn’t like the way the Nippers kids would talk about what to do if you got stuck in a rip. I knew there was something about parallel or perpendicular but my maths skills were just as good as my swimming at that point. I didn’t like my chances either way.

Last Christmas, my dad booked a holiday apartment overlooking the ocean. I am still not a swimmer. But my godfather had bought a new parasol to prop up on the beach, so I packed a big stack of books to take with me and imagined how it would feel to have a soft, salty breeze brushing my cheek as I read and dug my heels into the warm sand.

The sea outside the apartment window was glistening and

suddenly so heavy, above water. I remember the heaving, the plastic cap pulling on my hair and the way those one-piece swimsuits would stick to my body. I remember the chlorine in

my eyes, and the big clock that always seemed to be moving that I could never make sense of. glittering and so, so beautiful. But on the news the day we arrived, they said someone was floating around in that glistening, glittering, beautiful sea. Dead. And there it was again: the vastness of the ocean, the step that is not there.