finn brown
love lane
At first there are five of us. This is okay. This is easy. We move around each other. Then there are four. Two of the leftover people are a couple which we both already knew but now it invades the lane more. There are the two of them. There are the two of us who are not them. Single swimmers, up and down. I do breaststroke, mainly, glide and then circle, glide and then circle. You do front crawl, arms slicing through the water, churning it up.
The first time our arms touch I am not surprised. It is not an uncommon thing to happen, thin lanes make it so. I am watching the couple. He swims too close behind her and pinches her bum at the end of the lane. She moves to take off and he holds her back for a moment, arm around her waist, then lets her go.
And then the couple get out, and it is just the two of us, their sexual tension floating between us. A strange thing to be left with after that first touch. Stranger still when it happens again.
You glide past me and your finger in movement touches my thigh. It is a ringed finger. Your right hand though, so not marriage. Just a person who swims in their jewelry. At the end of the pool, I adjust the left strap of my swimming costume, empty my goggles, and watch you swim through a strip of sunlight. I watch it move from your head over your back, down your legs and beyond you. Suddenly you are very close to me, an arm away and I turn towards the tiles, as you land and push off again.
Two people, a slow man and a flippered woman, make their way into our lane, and I almost don’t notice when you step out of it and we are down to three.
***
When we first got together Lydia and I used to go swimming every week. We’d cycle over to London Fields Lido and make an afternoon of it. In the summer we’d take a picnic. In the winter, we’d fill flasks with tea.
After we got engaged, Lydia said to me, “I’m not coming swimming anymore. I’ve never liked it. I came because you love it and I thought I’d grow to. Anyway, I haven’t. And I think we’ve known each other long enough now to stop pretending. Don’t you?”
***
You have your hair down today and I wonder how it feels around your shoulders, if you chose to swim like this because you like the feel of it on your skin or because you forgot to bring a hairband with you this morning.
It is almost the same time as it was when we swam together last week but there are more people today. A lane is taken up with a swimming lesson and so the regular swimmers have been shunted along, forced closer to each other.
I take the steps into the pool and swim under the lane dividers until I reach our lane. I push off. We pass each other without touching on our first few lengths. I am focused on my technique, trying to hold my body as streamlined as possible for as long as I can because a swimmer that I follow on TikTok said that was the key to swimming further, to swimming for longer without tiring yourself out. My arms are over my ears and pointing straight, my body rolling, just the way the woman in the video told me to be.
You overtake along me, your body pulling its way up my left leg, the side of my ribcage, until you’re ahead of me, your kicking feet making busy water. At the end of the pool, you wait, and then just as I am about to get to you, you are off again, thrashing your way forwards.
Later you graze my leg with your arm as we swim in opposite directions. Several lengths on, and in a moment of boldness, I let my elbow connect with your ankle as we pass.
When you get out you look back at our lane and our eyes meet.
***
“You seem off,” says Lydia to me, after dinner. This is our time together. She works during the day, we eat across from each other and then I go out to work. She works in an office, I work in a bar. Neither of us enjoy what we do but that doesn’t really matter when you want to live in a gentrified part of East London.
“Do I?” We sit across from each other with empty plates. She is still wearing her work clothes, a sharp green trouser suit with a white shirt underneath. Everything I am wearing is wide and old, ready to have beer spilt on it. We look like we are from different worlds.
Lydia shrugs. “Just a feeling,” she says. “But if you aren’t going to tell me, you aren’t going to tell me. I won’t pull teeth.” She stands up and piles my plate on top of hers so forcefully I expect it to crack.
***
Your hair is up again today, which is a shame because I went to Boots and bought the same skin-coloured bands you wore in your hair the first day we swam together, just in case. I have two on my wrist and the skin beneath them is growing hot and red. My hair is short these days, and my wrists have forgotten how it feels to be cinched like this.
As always you arrive a little before me and when I climb into the pool you are at the other end, catching your breath.
Underwater I wonder how you are able to swim in the middle of the day. Do you work nights, like I do? In a bar or in a hospital or as a security guard. There are all sorts of jobs that happen at night. Maybe you are an artist, which is what I used to want to be before I realised that the people being hung in galleries straight out of college were all people who weren’t like me. But you’ve done it, against the odds. You’ve got sculptures in group exhibitions internationally, a solo show in a modest but well-lit gallery in Wandsworth. You’re in conversation with The Tate about filling that large room of theirs with one of the massive installations you’ve been making a name for yourself with. Good for you. Or you run your own business and sometimes that’s stressful, of course it is, but your hours are your own. You shut off your phone and take yourself off to the pool and no one can reprimand you for it and that’s why you don’t regret it even though people at the time told you it was a big move to make.
You swim backwards into me, look to your right and then cut past me via the wrong side of the lane. Your upper arm connects with my thigh. You slide your foot under my shoulder and I can feel that your toenails are painted with one of those rough glitter polishes that I used to use a lot as a teenager. How whimsical of you, I think. I decide to paint my nails tonight.
***
“It’s not like it’s the first time,” says Lydia, through a mouthful of food. “He’s an arsehole. We all know that. But what I don’t get is why none of the others say anything. There he is, talking over me, over Michelle, over Lora. And they let him. Sometimes I want to arrive at one of those meetings with a roll of gaffa tape and truss him up like a, like a -” She reaches for the word.
“Bird,” I say.
“Don’t speak for me,” she says.
“I thought you were trying to remember the saying.” I roll my eyes at her which means she won’t back down.
“You don’t know what I was going to say,” she says. She takes the plates over to the sideboard, fills up the sink and starts washing up.
I think about you, gliding past me in the pool, bodies grazing. I think about the kind of things we’d talk about over dinner. You’d talk about the people you’ve saved at the last minute on an operating table, show me plans for The Tate project, ask me to look over the social media strategy for your business because you’d know I’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. “I’m not happy,” I say.
Lydia doesn’t look up from the washing up, suds lining her long fingers. “Who is?” she says.
***
You are giving me space today, always a length or so ahead of me. It’s good. I need this, of course. I need to swim fast, to pummel my way through the water, unstoppered. We are equals today, you’re not able to overtake me. Often we reach opposite ends at the same time. We pause and look at each other across the pool, breathe in, and then push off and under together. Sometimes I lead the breath, sometimes you. We pass the responsibility between us, each keeping the other going.
You have probably had a hard week too, or perhaps you are just one of those people with a caring instinct. Either way you get me through my swim and only leave when I am starting to tire out.
Briefly, I think about running after you.
As if you know what’s in my head, you look back and flash me this wide, wide smile and I float my final few lengths giddily.
***
“It’s more than that, actually,” I say that evening, interrupting Lydia who is talking about a new reality TV programme that she is watching and hating but continuing to watch anyway.
Lydia looks at me, her eyebrows close together like she is trying to work me out, like I am a sum.
“More than happiness or unhappiness. I’ve met someone else,” I say.
Lydia snorts. “Who is it then?” she says. “Go on, tell me. Is it someone we know? Someone from work? Are you planning to leave?” There is a strange half smile on her face as she says all of this.
“They support me,” I say. “They are interested in me. They see me. We swim together.”
“You and your goddamn swimming,” Lydia says. She isn’t looking at me anymore. “Find somewhere else to stay for a few days,” she says. “I need some time to think.”
I check into a hostel, and in a room with five other bunk beds I go to sleep thinking about you.
***
Today we touch again and again. Bits of our bodies passing each other. The tenderest of touches, small and sweet and blissful. When you get out of the pool, you stand on the side for too long and I know that you are waiting for me. I clamber out after you, shower quickly, dry off, tuck my T-shirt into my trousers and then take it back out again.
When I come out of the changing rooms you are already heading for the exit. You walk through the automatic doors, and I think you might not stop. But then you do, of course. You get your phone out, and you lean, with one hip, against a bike rack.
“It’s me,” I say to the back of your head. You turn around. Your eyes are blue and they have red circles around them, the imprint of goggles leftover on your face. I reach out to touch them.
“What are you doing?” you say.
“It’s me,” I say again, like you ought to know. Because you ought to know.
You screw your eyes up at me.
“We swim together,” I say, and my voice is too high.
Your eyes get a bit wider. “Oh,” you say. You laugh and it’s a big thing. It bends your body. “Jesus, you scared me there. I thought you were some weirdo. Some crazy. But I recognise you. I do. Hard to tell with the goggles off sometimes, right? What a look. Not my finest.” You tuck your damp hair behind your ears and I think about how it will kink, if you leave it there to dry. You look at me. “Sorry,” you say, screwing up your eyes again which is how I know that this is a habit of yours. “Did you want something? Did I forget something? Only I’ve got somewhere I have to be. You know?”
I pull one of the hair bands off my wrist and hold it out to you. “This,” I say. “You dropped this.”
“Right, thanks, wow,” you say, one word after another. “I’m always losing these fucking things. I thought my daughter was stealing them but turns out I’m leaving them in changing rooms too. Guess you can’t blame your kids for everything, right?” You take the hair band out of my palm. “Thanks again,” you say, and then you walk away from me without looking back.
***
Lydia has left with all her things. “Ours,” she had once said, as she had handed over her credit card. But in moments like these, hers. I open drawers and cupboards and the fridge and all the doors to all the rooms in the flat. I look at all the empty space.
In the bathroom I take the last hair band off my wrist and place it in the mirror cabinet which just has my toothbrush in and a perfume Lydia’s aunt gave her for Christmas that she never liked. I trace my wrist around the red welt that the band has left, and the lighter one next it from the band I handed to you, which is closer to fading now. Two dips in the skin that sit side by side.
I imagine you turning my wrist around in your hands, holding your lips against this indent that was made for you, kissing it slowly. Your hair, still damp from the pool, brushes my palm.
Your daughter sits on the edge of the bath and watches us.
“Seems off to me,” says Lydia, from beside her.
Finn Brown is a queer writer whose work has been published in Queer Life, Queer Love 2 (Muswell Press), The Bombay Review, The Bittersweet Review, Penumbra Literary, Unbound Zine, Snowflake Magazine, All Existing and Texlandia Magazine. They are an alumni of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and an editor at t’ART.
