Sweeties

      Pull the pin, hear the ping, silver ball bounce and ding … Arm over arm, legs kicking, head twisting, breathing in, then out, so ordinary a Monday morning; inconceivable that anything out of the ordinary can happen, as Abel Jackson Marvin does his usual laps in the indoor fifty-metre pool at the Health & Wellbeing Centre off the High Street Mall. Recently turned sixty-seven, swimming three times a week for the past ten years, and even though fully retired now – two years ago with all the time in the world – he’s still doing his laps at five-thirty am, as soon as the pool opens. The lifesaving staff, rolling out the non-slip mats, set their clocks by the old geezer and laugh at his daily standard joke: Rolling out the red carpet for me, luv? … Yet Roma’s pinball chant is wrapped like a fluttering banner around the twisted, burned-out hulk of a wheelchair with the two welded, gaping red and black skeletons that are still lodged in his chest – as they have been for most of his adult life. He can hear her singing now as, half-way through his twenty laps, the luminous clock on the giant screen hanging over the pool – that same clock he’s seen for the past one thousand five hundred swims – those nervous digi­tal numbers wobble and expand, glow into his face with such ferocity that he waves to swat them away, but his hand – like a ghost – slips through the foot-high numbers of hours, minutes and seconds; and the white-clad nurse, just out of focus, lifts her hand and points a long finger at the clock to remind Abel that it isn’t counting down his laps but the seconds and minutes he has left to live, and Abel feels the warm comfort of the final solution to the scorched wheelchair embedded in his chest that it will all, finally, be over. He’ll be able to expunge that burned relic with the fused skeletons, and the lingering scorched smell, and mercifully and conclusively, Roma – still humming pull the pin, hear the ping, silver ball bounce and ding – will lift her fingers off the plastic flippers and allow the silver ball to ‘drain’, and it’ll be game over, man. Finally he’ll slip off the playfield into eternal peace as he’d half-wished while driving back from The Shelter; where the avocado-clad people – clapping and singing – had marched up to meet him, as his best friend George quite rightly quoted from Macbeth: as I stand my watch upon the hill I looked down towards Birnam, and anon methought, the wood began to move … But no, the ball is punched back into the playfield: You’re not getting off that easily, mate. As the clock relentlessly advances, Abel whacks away the pulsing numbers, swipes through them again and again, buries his face in the water to drown that walking forest image, Shangri-La consumed by the inferno of Hades … and he starts lap eleven, working steadily, swinging and kicking, head rotating, his breath is forced, the realisation surges through him: his retirement tranquillity is over, no longer will he and Pamsy meet their neighbours for a drink and bite at the pub on Monday nights, nor will he attend the U3A lectures on Tuesday arvo, or babysit grandkids on Wednesday, or go to the bowling club on Thursdays, or help out at Welfare House cooking up a storm for the mates and dearies – NO, no way, that life is now terminated, the white-clad nurse points out, leaning back and sipping her coffee … The confounded clock clutches at his face with the suction of an octopus, Abel heaves, instead of his usual seal-like turn, grasping, treading water, trying to rip off the clock stuck to his face, the changing numbers invade his body like parasites, wedge in his throat, throb ominously in his left arm, press down in his chest atop the charred, gaping vestige … The other barrel-chested man in his lane stops swimming and points at Abel and the white-clad nurse’s spirit announces: You can’t exit yet, mate – have you given a full account of yourself? Abel smacks at the apparition again – be gone – but not only doesn’t she disappear, she shimmers, tormenting him, refusing to come into focus, just as the black whale – a woman in glistening black and white striped bathers – raises one hand and comically echoes the nurse’s question: Have you given a full account of yourself? The women who swim breaststroke side by side cease their chatter to tread water, and like two parrots point at him and ask Abel the very same thing, and the blonde, blue-eyed lifeguard – in her baggy blue shorts, red polo with ‘LIFEGUARD’ on the front – looks at him and misses the socket in her belt, her small water bottle takes ages to majestically float sideways to the floor while her lips move: Have you given a full account of yourself, Abel? A stack of kick-boards, dropped by another lifeguard, silently tumble to the tiled floor, Abel counts them one by one, a total of nine,